PWM

Some informations

Here is a little work for the PWM Window Manager...

I love this window manager because of it's usability. You can put applications/windows into frames, it supports a lot of key-bindings, and is very lightweight.
So I made some patches in order to make it suit some of my less important needs, since it's also easy to hack as it is quite well written, thanks to Tuomo.
The last version of a standalone PWM is verion 1.0 and Tuomo gave it away to code ion. By now PWM is part of ion as a configuration option.
The advantage of PWM over ion is that frames don't actually take all of the screen space. That's interesting in the way that with my screen resolution (800x600) it's quite hard to use the extra space when you have some 80xH xterms if you want to see dockapps. More over, with a decent background, PWM looks really nice and is eye-candy to the newbs ;)

Screenshots and configuration

My screenshots an configuration samples rely on the patches I made. They all use a common base, but differs in look and frames configurations. Here is the configuration doc.
I appologize for the poor quality of some screenshots but import does not make good jpeg files. I didn't understand that before taking a PNG file instead.

Two configurations are quite well done :
- 1st a screenshot of a configuration using most of the options I added.
- My last configuration and the one I'm currently using (for a certain amount of time I think), and another. It's using some of my home-made fonts (taken from existing ones), a clock displayed on the root window - rootclock (it's made so that it can be used as a framework for rootapps applications) - and my new workspace indicator pwmwi3 (the old version - pwmwi2 - was not very efficient and not very eye-candy).

Common configuration files are :
- buttons.conf
- keys-default.conf
- kludges.conf
- menus-default.conf
- pwm.conf
- sound.conf

Specific files for configuration #1 are :
- frames-thomas1.conf
- keys-thomas1.conf
- look-thomas1.conf
- menus-thomas1.conf

Specific files for configuration #2 are :
- frames-thomas3.conf
- keys-thomas3.conf
- look-thomas3.conf
- menus-thomas3.conf


Common configuration files are using generic files that link to one of the specific configuration files (eg : look.conf -> look-thomas3.conf), and -default.conf files are included in specific files.

There are some other screenshots here but not all are related to PWM :)

Work on PWM

Not much theming or logo, but deeper changes : patches. I've done 2 patches. The first one allow to keep using the application title even when it's in tabs. That's usefull if you use several terms in the same frame and you want to see what directory you are in (in case you use the title bar to display informations like I do -- eg : thomas@exether (pts/4) : /home/thomas/public_html/pwm).
The second one (which is not yet finished) introduce sound support to PWM. You can affect sounds to some predefined events (see example), in any sound/music format you may want to use, and PWM will play them when those events occur. The remaining problem is that dialog windows produce also a sound, although they should not :-( (my code is inspired of WM's, and there, it works). Of course, to play sounds, PWM is not in itself a player, it only uses a player you have to define, with the right configuration option.

Now the patches :

See section Screenshots and configuration above to have configuration samples...
Yes, there is no third patch. The 3rd patch changes the tab's shape so that each tab has its right-top corner cut (bevel). But unfortunately, I had problems while moving a frame from a workspace to another... I still have work to do on it (I have ideas on how to acheive this, but it may be boring to code ;).

Note that these patches should be independent :)

Here is the original PWM source to which the patches apply.


Thomas Nemeth
Last modified: tue feb 24 13:05:50 CET 2004