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 Why is sawfish’s website so woefully out of date?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!