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https://github.com/mwitmer/guile-wm

A Window Manager Toolkit for Guile Scheme
https://github.com/mwitmer/guile-wm

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A Window Manager Toolkit for Guile Scheme

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README 

        
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                                GUILE-WM



                              Mark Witmer

                          [email protected]

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Table of Contents

─────────────────



1 Overview

2 Why?

3 What's Actually Implemented

4 What's Not Implemented

.. 4.1 Wish List

.. 4.2 Even Crazier Wish List

5 Sample

6 Installation and Prerequisites



1 Overview

══════════



  Guile-WM is a framework for creating an X window manager (or any other

  X application, really) and a set of useful modules designed for that

  purpose. Users are encouraged to pick and choose from ones presently

  available and contribute their own as well!



  Guile-WM relies /heavily/ on its user init file. In fact, it won't do

  anything on its own without one. The intention is to provide something

  100% configurable.



2 Why?

══════



  Guile Scheme is just so much fun to work with, I wanted to build my

  house out of it. (Also, StumpWM won't work in my Linux distribution

  right now. And I find LOOP macros unsettling for some reason.)



  I didn't want to build a WM on top of xlib. It's obsolete, or should

  be, anyway. XCB is great, and when I saw that it comes with XML files

  that describe the X protocol so that you can easily implement an X

  client in a different language, I decided to build the whole X client

  stack in Scheme. Why not? So I made Guile XCB. And then, finally, I

  got to work on this.



3 What's Actually Implemented

═════════════════════════════



  • keymaps/minibuffer/user-defined commands: The usual emacs-style

    stuff.

  • A tiling window manager inspired by Stumpwm, as well as a drag/drop

    window manager inspired by tinywm

  • Built-in repl: make changes to the WM while it's running, talk to

    the X server directly (if you're into that kind of thing), integrate

    with Geiser in Emacs, etc. (Note: if you call a procedure that talks

    to the X server, use the metacommand ,post to evalute the

    expression.  That way it'll run inside the event loop on the other

    thread).

  • Some icccm support

  • And more! It's completely open, so you could implement whatever

    window-management paradigm you like.



4 What's Not Implemented

════════════════════════



  There's a lot more I'd like to do, but as you can see, it gets

  progressively more grandiose and, um… crazy, perhaps.



4.1 Wish List

─────────────



  • Some kind of window decoration

  • Built-in replacements for those little X utility programs (xmodmap,

    xsetbg, etc.) I did part of xrandr as a proof-of-concept.

  • A status bar/modeline type thing

  • Antialiased fonts! guile-pango would be good for this.

  • Whatever else you want… ideas (and implementations) welcome.



4.2 Even Crazier Wish List

──────────────────────────



  • Implement enough of a widget toolkit to actually run Guile Emacs

    inside of Guile-WM all on Guile XCB. You would basically be running

    a Lisp-machine at that point and all of your friends will be

    jealous.

  • Add support for XInput2 to Guile XCB w/touch gestures and whatnot

    and build a hackable mobile device interface. Isn't it a tragedy

    that smartphones are becoming the most common type of computer, but

    you can't really hack on them? Real XCB does support XInput2 now, so

    I'm running out of excuses…

  • Build a WM on top of Wayland. That would require a Scheme Wayland

    client, which could be built along the lines of Guile XCB, since the

    Wayland projects comes with the same kind of XML spec files that XCB

    uses.



5 Sample

════════



  An annotated sample init file is included with the distribution as

  "wm-init-sample.scm". It demonstrates how to set up the configurable

  values in the available modules. Copy it to ~/.guile-wm to try it out.



6 Installation and Prerequisites

════════════════════════════════



  You can use the typical ./configure, make, make install chain to build

  Guile-WM.



  Guile-WM requires Guile XCB and the latest release of Guile (2.0.9).