How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)
1–10 of 250 posts
Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)
#2Maybe don't write an Xorg window manager right as the replacemeant for Xorg starts to take off though
Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)
#3Maybe don't write an Xorg window manager right as the replacemeant for Xorg starts to take off though
1. The article was written in 2014.
2. While it appears that Wayland is poised to replace X11 on Linux desktops given the amount of backing Wayland has compared to X11, it is not clear whether Wayland will replace X11 in the BSD ecosystem. According to the FreeBSD Wiki, Wayland is not ready to be a daily driver (https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Wayland), though work has been done getting Wayland compositors and other software to work on FreeBSD. I use X11 on my FreeBSD desktop. I'm unfamiliar with the current status of Wayland on NetBSD and OpenBSD. I expect X11 to live on for quite some time in the BSD world and among more conservative Linux users, similar to the situation regarding systemd in the Linux community, which was adopted by mainstream distributions and users but faced (and still faces) opposition from some users.
Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)
#4Slightly orthogonal to this: is there a good tutorial on writing your own simple Xserver?
Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)
#5Even if you don't intend to write your own WM, I think this article is a great reference for understanding how X works in general.
Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)
#6Plan 9's rectangle multiplexer, rio, needs an X11 mouse gesture addon for consistent Desktop Environment Application clipboard with Emacs's do/undo versatility.
Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)
#7Funny, yesterday someone posted an article about an Ada-based X implementation, and I thought “could be fun to write my own X”. I guess I wasn’t the only one!
Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)
#8So for someone who knows nothing about this stuff, how is Wayland different?
Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)
#9Talk about timing, I took my first plunge into writing code for X just a week or so ago and this was some really good reading. If someone is interested in digging into a non-toy, C codebase I can highly recommended dwm [1,2]. Yes, it is a very opinionated WM, but the code is clean, brief, and hackable – even for someone like me that has not hacked C for anything serious for over a decade – for something that can be used as a daily driver. It only took me about an hour or two to develop two patches that changed the layout to my liking. Plus, I have found the people in #suckless over at the OFTC IRC network to be very kind and helpful.
Re: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)
#10So for someone who knows nothing about this stuff, how is Wayland different?