quietlife.net

sawfish

03 Nov 2003

This is an open question on the off-chance that someone reading my website will know this. The question is: What the hell happened to sawfish?

Sawfish is by far the best window manager I have ever used, and development on it seems to have dropped off the face of the earth. From what I can tell, GNOME is to blame. It seems that sawfish was absorbed into GNOME development while it was the default window manager of choice, but was then subsequently dropped in favor of metacity, with development on sawfish ceasing:

With that being said, Sun will make every effort to get whatever work that has been done on Sawfish back into the community, mostly probably through bugzilla.gnome.org, so that it can be picked up by others if desired.

Where does that leave sawfish? Why is sawfish’s website so woefully out of date? Why does the 1.3 release lack features that even 0.38 had, such as “dialog windows inherit the focus from their parent” and “warp pointer to windows as they are cycled”? Where’s all the development? Don’t make me learn LISP, people!

Comments

Doug Orleans — November 03, 2003 at 23:27 · reply

Just get over yourself and learn LISP already! Resistance is futile!

charliem — November 04, 2003 at 11:34 · reply

“Don’t make me learn LISP” … I would say that attitude is probably the reason why other people stopped development on sawfish or rather so quickly jumped into the metacity boat. (btw it’s okay to call it Lisp these days) I’m sure it’s also due the “Lisp myths” that might have been true at its birth and early years in the 60’s but are now very much untrue..such as “Lisp is only interpretted and thus slow.”

However just browsing GMANE’s offering of sawfish mailing-list-archived-as-NNTP-interface posts, looks like there is still an active community of some sort out there. Best of all you don’t have to have your e-mail box spammed with another mailing-list subscription, just read what you want.

It really is a shame that Lisp doesn’t get the credit it deserves… I’d rather see it become a phoenix language than watch C# or Java take over…

me — February 16, 2004 at 07:03 · reply

How does the following in .sawfishrc work:

(setq warp-to-window-enabled t) (setq warp-to-window-offset (cons +8 +13))

I agree with your statements about sawfish; great window manager, dropped off the planet.

SAR — July 09, 2004 at 05:53 · reply

Thanks! Finally I found out how to do the warp pointer stuff. My configuration is now compelete :)

jake — May 25, 2005 at 14:26 · reply

your retarded

cwage — May 25, 2005 at 14:28 · reply

not MY retarded, YOUR retarded

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