Window Maker

[abarbarian]

GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/ThemesLatest news is WM has an entry in the Arch Wiki its own page no less.

 

https://wiki.archlin...hp/Window_Maker

 

This thread is slightly out of date but is full of useful stuff.

 

Anyone wanting to try out Window Maker on Arch will find these packages useful.

 

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/windowmaker/    (last update 2020)

or

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/windowmaker-crm-git  (last update 2022)

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/windowmaker-extra/

 

https://www.archlinu.../any/menumaker/

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?O=450&SeB=nd&K=wm&SB=n&SO=a&PP=50&do_Search=Go

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?O=500&SeB=nd&K=wm&SB=n&SO=a&PP=50&do_Search=Go

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?O=550&SeB=nd&K=wm&SB=n&SO=a&PP=50&do_Search=Go

 

I have not tried out the "menumaker" package. Instead I brought my main menu up to date with this tip from the WM home site. It is worth the time reading the "Doc's" at the site.

 

https://www.windowmaker.org/docs/installation.html

 

Quote

Generate a new root menu (accessible with F12) with wmgenmenu, for example

$ wmgenmenu > $HOME/GNUstep/Defaults/WMRootMenu

 

 

There are some dock apps at the AUR but not all of them run. There are loads and loads of dock apps to be found on the web. Do not be put of by the fact that development on some of them stopped decades ago. I managed to get a 1999 dock app to run though I was told that I really should have made an Arch package out of it first. With a bit of reading up and some minor twiddling I recon most reasonably experienced linux users would be able to find heaps of dock apps and get them running on Arch.

 

From the wiki

 

https://en.wikipedia...ki/Window_Maker

 

Quote

Window Maker is a free and open source window manager for the X Window System, allowing graphical applications to be run on Unix-like operating-systems. It is designed to emulate NeXT's GUI as an OpenStepcompatible environment and has been described as "one of the most useful and universal window managers available."^[1] Window Maker is part of the GNU Project

 

Quote

Window Maker has a reputation for being fast, efficient and highly stable. Window Maker has been characterized as reproducing "the elegant look and feel of the NeXTstep GUI" and is noted as "easy to configure and easy to use."

 

Quote

Window Maker has window hints which allow seamless integration with the GNUstep, GNOME, KDE, Motif and OpenLook environments. Significantly it has almost complete ICCCM compliance and internationalization support for at least 11 locales.

 

 

Quote

Window Maker was written from scratch primarily by Brazilian programmer Alfredo Kojima as a GNUstep desktop environment and originally meant as an improved take on the AfterStep window manager's design concept. The first release was in 1997.^[6] For a time it was included as a standard window manager in several Linux distributions and is also available in the FreeBSD ports collection.^[7] Since the goal of the project has been to closely emulate the earlier, clean industrial design of the NeXTstep and OpenStep GUIs, further development has been light. In late 2007 the widely available, stable release version was at 0.92 from July 2005 with subsequent maintenance updates having been made to some distribution packages and ports.^[8][9]

In late June 2008 a post on the project's website said active development would resume, noting, "...we are working very hard to revitalize Window Maker's presence on X Window (and perhaps beyond) desktops... We expect to once again provide the de-facto minimalist yet extremely functional window manager to the world."^[10] There have been no further posts since then, although development continues on the mailing list as of April 2011.^[11] On 29th January 2012, Window Maker 0.95.1 was released, making it the first official release in almost seven years.

 

 

To avoid litigation take note

 

Quote

The program's original name was WindowMaker (camelcased and without the space) but a naming conflict arose with an older product called Windowmaker from Windowmaker Software Ltd, a UK company producing software for companies that manufacture windows and doors. A 1998 agreement between the developers of Window Maker and Windowmaker Software specified that Window Maker (in the X Window sense) should never be used as a single word.

 

Anyone playing with Raspberry Pi's might find this window manager a perfect fit both for its low use of resources and its ease of customisation using simple coding.

 

I am enjoying playing with Window Maker and can heartily recommend it to folk

 

CLICK ON THE LINKS BELOW TO BE TAKEN TO THE RELEVANT INFORMATION POST

 

TIP - Shutdown pc -2017

TIP -- Change Docked Icon Behaviour - 2017

TIP -- Manual Menu Entry - 2017

WMBDAY  - 2017

TIP - Closing windows -2020

WMAMIXER - update 2020 New (2015) volume app - very neat.

THEMES GALORE - 2021Download links in the post

THEMES for WINDOW MAKER (101 themes) - 2021 Download link in the post

Jess Anderson Themes (93 themes) - 2021Download link in the post

Missing WPrefs.app  - 2022

How do you dock <insert program here> that doesn't have an appicon in WindowMaker?  - 2022

Tkremind calendar  - 2022

xscreensaver using .gif  - 2022

Window Maker on You Tube from today and back to the beginning of time

Force neofetch to show an entry for "WM"  - 2023

BUTTONMAKER - Make a dockapp with icon for any program  - 2023

Launch multiple instances of XTerm from one appicon?  - 2023

WorkspaceBack in themes - useful information  - 2023

What do I need to run to get GTK themes in WindowMaker in linux Mint.?  - 2024

Window Maker Users at Google.com  - 2024

Ready-made Window Maker Live CD ISO images for download  - 2024

ALT Window Maker Live  - 2024

Is Window Maker really that ugly ???? - 2024

Taskbar at the top or the bottom ? - 2024

wmdl a LOAD or CPU monitor - 2024

MX Respin Window Maker   - Live .iso  - 2024

 

Usefull links

 

Window Maker Tips and Tricks

Window Maker - Your NeXT window manager r/windowmaker

Window Maker Dockapps - tons of em

Edited March 8 by abarbarian

[securitybreach]

Excellent write up, thanks

[abarbarian]

I'm suprised the Pi crowd have not jumped on the Window Maker wagon. It is a perfect fit for pie makers.

[ichase]

Thanks abarbarian. I think I may check this out this weekend.

[abarbarian]

Thanks abarbarian. I think I may check this out this weekend.

 

I tried a few ready made conkys out on my Window Maker on Arch and they worked just fine. No fiddling with configs they just worked.So you should find all your fine customised conkys will work otb.

[abarbarian]

After my E17 love affair I am back using WM.

 

There have been some changes for the better since I last played. I can recommend installing "wmakerconf"

 

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/wmakerconf/

 

this is a alternate to the Wprefs utility shipped with WM and much friendlier to use. Makes customising your own themes a breeze. The Arch Wiki page has changed since I last looked and installing WM on Arch was straightforward. WM runs very well and seems pretty nippy. I have managed to make some customisations and it looks like I'm going to have some fun playing.

[ichase]

Abarbarian, well you have definitely convinced me to give Window Maker a try. Thinking if time permits, it may very well be close to the top of the to do list tomorrow morning.

[abarbarian]

You may find these of interest then.

 

All about icons,

 

http://pclosmag.com/...104/page14.html

 

Some pretty icons (the right size)

 

http://www.afterstep...ex&src=/desktop

 

An some examples of dock apps most of which I think work at the moment. However they are not yet in Arch package format, yet !

 

http://tigr.net/afterstep/applets/

 

Excellent read and some very useful information by a real nutjob fanatic supporter of WM.

 

http://windowmakeran...el/Window Maker

 

I'm having fun at the moment. Funnily enough it all seems much easier than when I tried before. I have the feeling that WM will be my staple whilst penguining.

 

I nearly forgot there is a Google+ for WM,,

 

https://plus.google.com/communities/108662612726859551678

 

An did I mention it only uses 7 to 10 MB of memory.

Edited May 3, 2013 by abarbarian

[abarbarian]

Several themes for Window Maker. I have not tried all of them only a selection from each site just four or five each from the two main sites. A couple from each site are very very tasty. Like this one , greenriver.Near perfect though I would have made the icon backgrounds the same colour as the greyish frame.

 

Full Size

 

 

http://www.jessanderson.org/wmthemes/index.html

 

http://lonelymachines.org/windowmaker-themes/comment-page-1/#comment-17698

 

http://www.petertribble.co.uk/Solaris/wmaker.html

 

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Looks like a lot of work. Think I'll just stick with KDE4.

[abarbarian]

Looks like a lot of work. Think I'll just stick with KDE4.

 

Well I think it is the easiest to customise that WM I have tried so far. I even managed to cobble together a quick test theme which shows up in my theme list.

 

Full Size

 

 

It has taken a bit of rooting around on the net but I have tracked down the original WM FAQ/Manual thingy which was last updated in 2001.

 

http://web.archive.org/web/20030401182339/http://www.dpo.uab.edu/~grapeape/wmfaq.html#8.4

 

Which led me to this archived page on theming that contained a cli gem that I used to create a customised theme.

 

http://web.archive.org/web/20030413050156/http://largo.windowmaker.org/themes/themepacks.php

 

You can of course use a gui to make your own theme. Reconed I'd better learn how to do it via the cli otherwise Securitybreach would be badgering me.

There is an excellent fairly modern and up to date MANUAL for WM to be found here,

 

http://wmaker.orconhosting.net.nz/help/user_guide/toc.htm

 

I always thought KDE was pretty slick. The only experience I have had with it lately is on Porteus an I was quietly impressed.

 

[abarbarian]

I been fiddling with WM and finalised a THEME I was working on. I call it BlackBird and it can be found at the link below.I'm hosting BB and twelve other theme packs I found on the net over at my DropBox account so they should be available as long as I have the account.

 

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/u97bmsly4t1nn4o/hni5QFyjuq

 

Enjoy.

[abarbarian]

Been making another theme from a picture I took. Darn process has me well baffled ! How on earth did I do saves last time. Hmmm. An I can not just seem to find the right shade of colour. Oh well Specsavers and bed for me then.

[abarbarian]

FULL SIZE

 

 

Old Reliable - theme

 

I concocted this from a photo I took from me kitchen window using Gimp.Had a lot of fun trying to get the border frame to be a tad more browny pink and I am still not 100% satisfied with the colours but it will have to do. I fried me brain a little with trying out all the different options in Gimp and me eyes were struggling to notice differences in hues so I had to call it a day.

The photo had a slight alteration to the colour palette as the original was a little too blueish and I wanted a more earthy look.

All in all even though it took me ages to do it was fun trying out some of the more complex themeing options in Window Maker an I now feel just a tad more at home in Gimp, just a tad mind you.

 

Enjoy.

 

 

Ooooops missed out that the calendar etc is me latest find Rainlendar which I spotted in use over at Arch G+.

Edited November 25, 2013 by abarbarian

[abarbarian]

Well I wanted a shutdown button on me desktop as WM does not have one.

Hmm how to accomplish this ?

I posted on G+ and one chap told me he used to have such a thing, an then gave advice as to using C to write a program that would call up root and shutdown the pc. A tad too involved for me at the moment.

So I looked at the Arch Wiki pages on,

Power management

Systemd

Polkit

TuxOnice

Linux-pf

Fbsplash

LXPolkit

they took a load of reading.

I was convinced that my quest would be difficult to accomplish due to needing to become root and then shutting down. As I have been doing either exiting WM or using xterm, either way was a few steps and loads of typing.Well maybe just a bit of typing. Any typing is too much in my opinion.

Then I found the solution. It was there in front of me but I had been sidetracked by the wiki. This especially,

 

 

polkit is necessary for power management. If you are in a local systemd-logind user session and no other session is active, the following commands will work without root privileges. If not (for example, because another user is logged into a tty), systemd will automatically ask you for the root password.

 

Duh that is pretty obvious I hear you cry.

Well not to me. You see I have a script that generates a list of packages installed and when I looked at it to see if polkit was on it it was not.Now I thought that meant polkit was not installed, so of I went reading here there and everywhere.

Until I thought maybe "yaourt -Q polkit" would be a good idea. I have no idea why that thought struck me but it did.It could have happened earlier but it did not, hmmmmmm.So polkit is installed I found.

Now maybe if I did,

$ systemctl poweroff

 

would it work ? Well of course it did.

So,

In /home/bloodaxe/GNUstep/Defaults/WMState I added (in red)

 

 

 

{

Dock = {

Applications1200 = (

{

Forced = No;

Name = Logo.WMDock;

BuggyApplication = No;

AutoLaunch = No;

Position = "0,0";

Lock = Yes;

PasteCommand = "systemctl poweroff";

Command = "/usr/lib/GNUstep/Applications/WPrefs.app/WPrefs";

},

 

Which adds the command as a second function activated by a middle click on the mouse to the Dock Icon.

An hey presto. One middle click and me pc shuts down.

 

Don't you just love getting to the top of the mountain.

Edited December 6, 2013 by abarbarian

[Guest LilBambi]

Jim used to use WM all the time. Was his all time favorite... So lightweight for slower computers w/not much memory.

 

He still loves it but is able to use KDE on his AMD 64-system these days w/2GB RAM. He still uses iWM on his older system though. He still loves that older system and still uses them both every day.

 

Very nice job on the customizations!

[abarbarian]

Very nice job on the customizations!

 

Thanks. I hit a snag with the customizing. I got everything looking right and the config files looked correct. Took the screenshot and restarted WM a few times, everything ok. Then after rebooting the theme had changed and I could not get it back as I had it.

I think the problem is that I am trying to use a "Textured Gradient - Horizontal" for the window title bars. Originaly I made the two colour choices and they showed up in the wmakerconf gui as a pixmap and they seemed to show up in the config files. Now no matter what I do I can not get them to work or show up anywhere.Recon I need to make a graded pixmap so am searching for a way to do that.

It is strange that evrything worked and showed up ok and now it does not. An there is not a great deal of in depth info out there about WM themes. I'll find an answer sometime no doubt.

[Guest LilBambi]

Good luck on it!

 

Didn't you say you mad a back up of the config file?

[abarbarian]

Good luck on it!

 

Didn't you say you mad a back up of the config file?

 

I did but that is screwed aswell. It does give me the original colour codes though. An I'm tending to think that me problems are caused by "Textured Gradient - Horizontal" stuff.

[Guest LilBambi]

I had the biggest problem with transparency with Gnome a long time ago on Ubuntu when I tried it out ... back when KDE was broken, and the transparency totally broke the GUI.

 

Got me so upset I swore of Gnome again too.

 

Later, Ubuntu Gnome fixed being able to do the transparency on the task bar. I used it for a while but it was just so ... I don't know ...

Edited December 7, 2013 by LilBambi

[securitybreach]

Very nice Abarbarian, nice job at troubleshooting

[saturnian]

As I mentioned in another thread, I installed WindowMaker in Bridge Linux. So I've been reading the documentation, but right away I messed something up and don't know how to fix it. See the following screenshot of the default desktop:

 

https://en.wikipedia...aker-0.80.2.png

 

Of course that's an earlier WindowMaker version; here, I see:

 

extra/windowmaker 0.95.5-3 [installed]

 

Anyway, playing around with the buttons or whatever at the upper-left corner, now I only have the first one. I think I originally had the second one, the one that looks like a computer, and I'm not sure if I had the third one or not. I was messing around and deleted it. With the effects, it looked like it blew up into little pieces, and then it was gone!

 

Well, I'd like to get that second button back, and the third one as well, if that was originally there. I don't know what they are. Can someone help me out? I reinstalled WindowMaker but my current settings were retained.

 

Taking baby steps here.

[saturnian]

Okay, so I've played around a bit, messed some things up, gotten a feel for things. (Figured out that the second icon, mentioned above, was for xterm.) Decided to start fresh again, so I deleted the ~/GNUstep directory and reinstalled WindowManager again. With what I've learned so far, I'm gonna take another shot at setting things up.

 

Kinda fun. I can't say that I like WindowMaker better than Openbox, but I do like it better than I expected to. One thing I haven't figured out yet, how to get a nice clock onto the dock. I installed wmcalclock and wmblueclock but when I run either of those there's a "mini-icon" at the bottom-right and I don't see how to get the icon onto the dock. Oh, well, back to the documentation...

[saturnian]

Kinda taking shape!

 

Here's how Window Maker looked in Bridge when I first logged in, except with xfce4-screenshooter running (icon at the bottom-left):

 

 

And, after setting things up a bit -- here showing the root menu opened up:

 

 

With Chromium open (the dock position is set to "Auto raise & lower"):

 

 

Looks like there's a lot more that can be done with Window Maker, but for now I mainly wanted to get things to where I'm comfortable using it. I set up three workspaces. The menu editing via the Window Maker Preferences GUI (WPrefs is pretty good). Lots of customization options available with WPrefs.

 

Very nice environment to use; I'm having no problem with navigating around the desktop and getting things done. In appearance, simple yet nice-looking, just the way I like it. A big "thanks" to abarbarian for the suggestion to try out Window Maker!

Edited April 21, 2014 by saturnian

[abarbarian]

http://forums.scotsn...171#entry385584

 

To help folk you may like to consider carrying on this thread at the above adding a post with a link to here.

 

Glad you are enjoying the WM goodness. I find it a very nice desktop environment.Theming and changing wallpapers is neat and easy which I really like.

The clock that comes as standard can change the colour and appearance by middle clicking I think, hmm or maybe middle clicking and right clicking. I'm not at home and am posting from Makulu so can not try and me head is full of other stuff.

 

If you have Q's I 'll be happy to try and help out but am still learning meself.

 

 

One thing missing from WM is a shut down button. If you look at post 15 from the above thread I posted a solution.

Edited April 21, 2014 by abarbarian

[abarbarian]

Saturnian reignited my WM passion and I just found this,

 

A big list of WindowMaker DockApps

 

 

which may or may not be of use to folk.

[saturnian]

Thanks to abarbarian for steering me over to here from this thread. [Edit: looks like the two threads have been combined.]

 

Looks like a lot of work. Think I'll just stick with KDE4.

 

From what I'm seeing, it's a lot of work only as far as reading the documentation and trying to get a feel for what's what. After that, very easy to customize and use. I didn't really think I'd like it, but I always figure that if other people like a certain DE/WM, there must be some good reasons, and it'll probably be worth it to spend a little time with it and discover those reasons for myself. Glad I decided to take a closer look.

 

That dang abarbarian. My world was perfectly fine, running Openbox (which has been my favorite WM to use), until he started stirring [things] up by mentioning Window Maker in another thread here.

Edited April 21, 2014 by saturnian

[saturnian]

The clock that comes as standard can change the colour and appearance by middle clicking I think, hmm or maybe middle clicking and right clicking.

 

Well, I added wmclockmon. From its manpage:

 

By clicking on the background with the button 1 while holding down the control key, you can switch to internet time display (in beats) and the same action bring back to the local time. You can start directly with internet time (see the -it option).

 

Clicking with the mouse button 2 (middle) while holding down the control key, launches the configuration tool. If you don't hold the control key down, it cycles through the different styles.

 

Clicking with the mouse button 3 (right) while holding down the control key, launches the calendar tool.

 

But wmclockmon is one of the clock dock apps I've tried that I don't see how to add to the Window Maker dock! I can drag it around the desktop with the cursor by holding down the MOD (alt) key, but it won't actually "stick" to the dock. Some other clocks do.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Wow! A quote of mine from almost a year ago.

[saturnian]

Yeah -- sorry, just wanted to comment about the "work" part, from my perspective. Reading the documentation was kind of a pain -- not that it was poorly-written or anything like; it's just that I had to make myself do it, so that part counts as work!