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Guile-WM: A Window Manager Toolkit for Guile Scheme (github.com/mwitmer)
48 points by pmoriarty on Dec 13, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 14 comments



Wow this is great.

I have always wanted to create a window manager ever since I read "The X Window System: Programming and Applications with Xt, OSF/Motif" years ago but unfortunately never got around to it and never had the motivation to look back. This makes it easy. Thanks!

Edit: If you're going to downvote, explain why.


https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you."

After writing out the text of a comment, stop before you hit the "send" button, and honestly ask yourself the painfully tough question, "Does my comment actually contribute to the discussion?"

"Have I asked a good question?" (where "good" means not easily answered with a bit of effort or a search engine).

"Have a provided a good answer?" (where "good" means not easily answered with a bit of effort or a search engine).

"Am I a well studied expert with lots of experience in this specific field such that others on HN will appreciate my personal opinions or anecdotes?"

"Did I add some additional insight or reference?"

"Did I include links to external resources?"

And the most difficult of all, "Did I remember to be civil?"

It's surprising and humbling to realize but in nearly all cases, my personal opinion fails to matter and is actually just noise. Even a comment that just says "Thanks!" fails to add much besides noise to the discussion and everyone is better off if you just silently use the up-vote button to show your appreciation. Though I personally can't bring myself to down-vote the mostly useless "Thanks!" comments, I did down-vote your comment for complaining about down-votes and for essentially baiting for votes. Since you're new here, and you asked for an explanation for the down-votes you've received, I've given you the best explanation I can muster. I hope it helps.


Guile-WM is a very neat project and fun to hack on since, like Emacs, you can edit it while it runs. It needs some more love to be usable for me as my daily driver, though. If I could only figure out the cause of a couple of bugs, things would be good enough for me.


It's not the first WM to be based on Guile, even:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scwm


I like reading the config file https://github.com/mwitmer/guile-wm/blob/master/wm-init-samp...

a xmonad cousin


see also Guix.

http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/

> Hackable. It provides Guile Scheme APIs, including high-level embedded domain-specific languages (EDSLs), to describe how packages are built and composed.


I wish this was available for FreeBSD.


Want to help port it? :)


iirc, sawfish (http://sawfish.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page) was there a long time ago, but haven't used it in a while...


Sawfish rocks, but is implemented in c and scripted through lisp (in a dialect called "Rep").

Guile-wm is lisp all the way down, is implemented with Guile-xcb, a X client written completely in Guile.


I stop hearing about it when GNOME switched their WM.


It's a cool hack, but with X obsolescent is there much long-term use for it?


Wayland provides something similar to xcb, so guile-wayland can be written in the same way that guile-xcb is.


No, it doesn't. Wayland is far, far different from X, being a protocol for handling of local framebuffers only. In fact Wayland makes the concept of window managers obsolete: all window management takes place in the compositor. So the further development of window managers is a bit akin to solving yesterday's problems today.




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