Custom windows shells (I know this is just a window manager, but still) in the year of our lord 2025? This takes me back to the days of installing bb4win and litestep in XP. I'm a kid again!
Oh shit yes: Rainlendar
Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
41–50 of 112 posts
Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
#42Custom windows shells (I know this is just a window manager, but still) in the year of our lord 2025? This takes me back to the days of installing bb4win and litestep in XP. I'm a kid again!
flashback, 2001. I'm 25, sitting in the office with litestep installed (which honestly was the only alternative to Linux or resignation). My five years younger colleague steps up to my desk and says "hey, cool desktop!"
I start explaining, very carefully, like I'm talking to a child, that this is an alternative shell, which replaces the standard Windows Explorer et cetera, und so weiter... it's very complicated you know...
Guy says, "cool... hey, why don't you check out this URL?". I do. It's the litestep contributor page. His nick is on it. Near the top.
Ow.
Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
#43It's not a tiling manager but slightly related: I replicated Spectacle/Rectangle (macOS apps) on Windows a while ago to snap windows to edges/corners/two-thirds/one-thirds etc a while back. If you're interested: https://github.com/ahmetb/RectangleWin/blob/main/README.md
I love Rectangle, will definetly check this out!
Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
#44I always disliked the chaos that happens quickly with application windows, and loved the idea of tiling. But none of them really worked for me practically until I found PaperWM around a year ago or so (gnome extension). It has few core shortcuts and feels more natural. Like you would really arrange applications directly on your desk. It does not limit itself by your screen width and has the nice default that a new wi…
Jwno can do this! https://agentkilo.itch.io/jwno/devlog/871672/scroll-jwno-scr...
Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Janet is quite...liberal? It's a practical language, but doesn't force a specific paradigm on you. There're "escape hatches" in different levels of the language, and I like that. Maybe the most "opinionated" things in Janet are the ev stuff and fibers. I think they're done right though, you just need to be careful with the event loop when embedding Janet.
How it compares with Lua?
If you like Janet and Lua, might as well try Fennel, which was made by the creator of Janet.
Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
#46Janet looks really neat. And this project seems really cool. Windows DESPERATELY needs a more powerful built-in manager. It's ridiculous to use the mouse all the time.
> Windows DESPERATELY needs a more powerful built-in manager. It's ridiculous to use the mouse all the time.
And yet, I find Windows window management far more advanced than macOS. It's ridiculous that up until recently, macOS didn't even have basic max-size functionality w/o reaching for 3rd party apps.
Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think it's inspired by Clojure and Lua, and somehow manages to be better than both This is exactly how I feel about Janet too. I don't think I have enough experience on Clojure or Lua to comment on them, but I got attracted to Janet almost immediately. Working on Jwno also confirms my first impression on Janet: It's really a practical language. The tooling has some room for improvement, but the language itself ca…
How’s the REPL/interactive editing story? I feel weird using a Lisp that is not as interactive as Racket, Scheme or Common Lisp. Running scripts from the REPL ain’t the same thing as C-x C-e an expression on a live program
> I feel weird using a Lisp that is not as interactive as Racket, Scheme or Common Lisp
I think Racket and Scheme don't belong in there because neither has a REPL as powerful and "interactive" as Common Lisp REPL. They don't support images either (but Janet and CL do).
Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
#48Custom windows shells (I know this is just a window manager, but still) in the year of our lord 2025? This takes me back to the days of installing bb4win and litestep in XP. I'm a kid again!
Sloop manager for replacing progman.exe in windows 3.1, for me..
Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
#49I'm curious, did you find there were things that were easier to do because it's Janet/lisp-like language? Or you just fancied like using it (perfectly valid reason of course!). I tried various lisp dialects, but I could never find the killer feature vs other languages I already use. And I can justify why I use these specific languages I do use, if that makes sense.
I find the REPL and interactive development workflow invaluable. A window manager is a long-running background service by nature, and has a lot of accumulated runtime states. The ability to peek inside and debug while the process keeps running helped me a lot when building Jwno. I think Jwno's REPL module is so important, I specifically changed Jwno's architecture at one point to make it work.
> I find the REPL and interactive development workflow invaluable. A window manager is a long-running background service by nature, and has a lot of accumulated runtime states. The ability to peek inside and debug while the process keeps running helped me a lot when building Jwno.
Sure, but any particular reason you picked Janet over Common Lisp? They both support images, REPL, hot-code-reloading, etc.
Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
How’s the REPL/interactive editing story? I feel weird using a Lisp that is not as interactive as Racket, Scheme or Common Lisp. Running scripts from the REPL ain’t the same thing as C-x C-e an expression on a live program
> I feel weird using a Lisp that is not as interactive as Racket, Scheme or Common Lisp I think Racket and Scheme don't belong in there because neither has a REPL as powerful and "interactive" as Common Lisp REPL. They don't support images either (but Janet and CL do).
There's multiple dimensions you can slice and dice the Lisp family by. Images and REPL experience are two big ones, but they're almost orthogonal.