Thu, 17 Nov 2005
Back to Sawfish
I have been using Sawfish as a window manager of choice on all my workstation except the main workstation at work, which is AMD64 dual-head, and I had problems running it on this setup.
On Monday we have discussed with Oozy the features of our desktop environments, and I have decided to give Sawfish another try. Sawfish is an extensible window manager partly written (and configured) in Lisp (yes, those fscking parentheses :-). Since Sawfish project did not make a release in two years or so, I have decided to compile the CVS version. The packages for Fedora 4 (SRPMs and AMD64 binary RPMs) are in my FTP directory.
It works except few minor glitches (sawfish-ui crashing), and now I can have Galeon fixed at workspace 1 of the second head (metacity did not support that or it did not work in it), Liferea on Workspace 4 of the second head, Mutt window without decorations, etc. The workspace switching works correctly (unlike metacity, which has this 2+ years old unfixed bug.
I have to add an usability rant: why there are so many window manager themes with the following flaw: the focus of the window is shown only by changing the title bar (default theme in Fedora, sawfish's microGUI theme, etc.). When the window is partly obscured, it cannot be seen whether it is active or not, or even which window is active (unless you use the brain-dead approach of "the focused window is always on top", of course).