
Window Maker Nostalgia - fcambus
http://www.cambus.net/window-maker-nostalgia/
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mhd
Let's also not forget the unsung hero of the "let's pretend we're NextStep"
saga, "bowman" (a fvwm hack). A much shorter shelf-life than its successors
AfterStep and WindowMaker, but the one that started it all...

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talideon
IIRC, that's because bowman became AfterStep.

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mhd
Yep, the main abrahamic lineage of X11 window managers. uwm begat twm which
begat fvwm which begat bowman...

For quite a while, the window manager space was really dominated by rewrites
and adaptions. Not quite sure what the first window managers of GNOME and the
K(ool)DE were based on, but I wouldn't be surprised if some familiar names
turned up...

An important second clan would be the 9wm ancestry. lwm, aewm and probably a
lot of the tiling wm namespace.

Jeepers, I remember being excited when Xaw3D came out. This thread is really
making me feel old, and goshdarnit, Pentium Pros with Slackware didn't happen
_that_ long ago..

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fmela
This brings back memories of going from one window manager to the next
(blackbox, fluxbox, or enlightment anyone?) and fiddling with the
configuration endlessly. Now I don't think twice and just use whatever the
default is.

~~~
muhfuhkuh
At my last job, we sat around in the support bullpen trying to outdo each
other with our desktops. The more 3D and "Matrix-y" the better. There was so
much green phosphor text you'd think you were in a room full of old IBM 3270
CICS terminals.

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cmgreen
Aww. I miss using Window Maker. I used to maintain the FAQ as it was the first
software project I was involved with. To set the era, newsgroups were active
but dying, freenode irc was shiny and new, freshmeat (now defunct) hadn't
launched yet, linux.com hadn't lost millions, and slashdot hadn't launched,
and Linux was a pita to keep working on my Dell laptops.

I still give people the advice to get involved with a project even if just in
a docs roll at first.

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Joeri
The fondest computing memories I have is my Pentium II 233 mhz machine, with
128 MB RAM, running a heavily tuned debian with window maker on a 15 inch
trinitron nokia monitor. It was the best window manager on the best monitor of
the era. For its time it was an amazing hardware and software combination. I
went from that system to a mac mini, and although in many ways it was a step
up, the OS X window manager and dock were definitely a step down.

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wazoox
I still use windowmaker as my main work PC WM. It works beautifully.

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bni
There used to be a site called Largo? that had awesome themes for Window
Maker. Fond memories..

~~~
icebraining
[http://web.archive.org/web/20040925054028/http://largo.windo...](http://web.archive.org/web/20040925054028/http://largo.windowmaker.org/)

:)

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xiaomai
Wow, I have fond memories of using WindowMaker. I was really excited to see
some recent development with new featuers this past summer
([http://windowmaker.org/news.php](http://windowmaker.org/news.php)). I spent
a few days with it, I was surprised at some of the defaults. For instance,
click to raise isn't enabled by default. That's probably how I used it all
those years ago. Anyway, I agree it's lovely. The main things I was missing
were modern looking applets (but the Wolfenstein-face CPU monitor is classic),
and also better compositor integration (for stuff like expose-style window
switching).

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bitwize
I use a tiling wm (i3) now, but before that it was Window Maker all the way,
from 1998 until about 2012. Fantastic piece of software: straightforward,
clean, and beautiful to look at.

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alrs
You can have pretty much the same UI in Openbox today.

Openbox + devilspie + xcompmgr + rxvt-unicode + Firefox with Pentadactyl is
perfect. Especially on a 1440x900 12" X200s.

~~~
dima55
Or, you know, you can run WindowMaker. It didn't go anywhere

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haddr
I used Window Maker and I liked it! It was very smooth even on old machines,
like 486... And those dockapps! Lovely and cool!

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ezy
Wow, I thought I was the only one who preferred that WM. I should try and get
it running in my ubuntu instance again...

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bnolsen
i still use windowmaker on my desktop development system. its very efficient
and doesnt get in the way.

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Xylemon
Same here, I love using WM with OSS. Feels like bread and butter, especially
considering WMMixer (and many dockapps) were made for OSS.

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bnolsen
i run the alsa version of that mixer and wmclock.

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pjmlp
It was my window manager back in 1998-2004, then it went stale. Fond memories.

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bkeroack
Brings back memories. I still miss focus-follows-mouse.

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ginko
You can enable that in pretty much any wm.

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harrystone
Still using it, at home and at work.

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cbd1984
I use Window Maker on Ubuntu. Great mix of simplicity and usability.

