Read Me
SCWM 0.4
This is a beta release of scwm, the Scheme Configurable Window
Manager. SCWM is (currently) a hack of FVWM 2 with the fvwm
configuration language replaced with Guile Scheme. Eventually, it will
support many new features enabled by the powerful configuration
language, including a GUI on-the-fly setup. Already many cool features
have been added. The base binary is now smaller than fvwm2's, though
memory usage is still higher. Placing some features in dynamically
loadable shared libraries should help with this even more.
This fifth release implements nearly all useful fvwm2 functions, and
fixes some of the bugs from the last release. The only functionality
still missing is: everything related to modules. FVWM Modules will
probably never be implemented, because I have better ways to provide
similar functionality. An interactive repl is available through the
-i command-line option. This release, although labelled beta, should
be pretty stable and moderately useful. I've regularly used scwm as my
window manager for about four months now.
I've only tried compiling it on i386-unknown-linux, but any platform
that both fvwm2 and guile will build on should work. I've heard
success reports on sparc-sun-solaris. You need to have
guile installed to do the build. See the file INSTALL for further
instructions.
There's various kinds of documentation and random info in the doc
directory, and you can see some examples of what might be done in the
system.scwmrc, the gjb.scwwmrc and decor.scwmrc, and also looking at
the modules in the scheme directory.
However, the system.scwmrc is not very interesting right now. If you
think of neat hacks for it, pass them along to me. If people even want
to work on the windowmanager itself, that's cool too.
Things to look for in the near future include: more cleaning up of the
leftover fvwm-isms in the code, restruccturing of the internal data
structures, a more complete external interface, and a start on
integrating guile-gtk and/or guile-tk so that you can create your own
arbitrary gui elements.
The copyright for the code in the scwm and libs subdirectories is the
fvwm copyright, which may be found in COPYING.FVWM. Several files may
have a slightly different copyright, or be under our copyright. The
files in the scheme directory are under GPL (see scheme/COPYING). The
files in the doc directory are all under the copyright specified by
doc/COPYRIGHT.DOC.
- Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@mit.edu> and
Greg J. Badros <gjb@cs.washington.edu>