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Read Me
Scwm @VERSION@
This is a beta release of
Scwm, The Scheme Constraints Window Manager.
Written and maintained by:
Greg J. Badros <gjb@cs.washington.edu> and
Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@alum.mit.edu>
and other (see AUTHORS)
Web site: http://scwm.mit.edu/
Ftp directory: ftp://scwm.mit.edu/pub/scwm/
Online manual: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/gjb/scwm-doc/
(See additional specialty documentation in the sub-directory "doc/")
Scwm is the Scheme Constraints Window Manager, a highly dynamic and
extensible window manager for the X Window System. Scwm embeds Guile
Scheme as the configuration and extension language, and includes a
sophisticated constraint solver for permitting the user to interactively
specify constraints among top-level window sizes and positions. Nearly
all decorations can be changed at run-time on a per-window basis.
Dynamic loading of C modules is supported. Scwm is self-documenting and
provides A powerful protocol for interacting with the window manager
from other processes.
If you're reading this before 15-October-1999, please take time to
submit your vote for Scwm as your favorite window manager at the Linux
Journal's Reader's Choice awards:
http://207.178.22.52/contest/readchoice.html
Features Scwm provides include:
o GNOME compatibility
o GUI configurability
o sophisticated window decoration system
o integrated interaction and documentation system
(Emacs or readline based)
o integration with guile-gtk widget bindings
o extensible window manager hooks, placement procedures,
and more to provide the ultimate in behaviour configurability
o flexible menu system, permitting dynamically loadable
menu drawing primitives
o animated window movements, resizes, and shading
o synthetic key press events (no more mouse needed to click on
URLs in netscape!)
o XTest module, for "real" events under program control
o proplist module, for integration with WindowMaker proplists.
o constraint-based window layout
(see README-constraints for more details and
see http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/constraints/cassowary/
for information about the solver)
o IBM ViaVoice voice recognition capabilities (only on x86 GNU/Linux)
This release, although labeled beta, is reasonably stable and
exceedingly useful. Many individuals, including the developers, have
been using Scwm as their primary window manager for over a year. We
make every effort to eliminate segmentation faults and other bugs, but
make no guarantees -- use at your own risk, as always.
Scwm builds on i386-pc-linux, i386-pc-freebsd, sparc-sun-solaris,
alpha-linux-unkown, mips-sgi-irix, and generally any platform where both
guile and cassowary will build. We recommend using guile-1.3.4
currently. 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
startup files included in the sample.scwmrc/ directory. Also consider
browsing the Scwm modules in the scheme/ and the example/test code in
the scheme/tests/ directory. See doc/scwm-intro-tutorial.scm for
a basic introduction to Scwm, Scheme, and means for interacting with
and customizing your Scwm environment.
Things to look for in the near future include: an event-binding system
rewrite, better support for the Cassowary constraint solving toolkit,
better support for using guile-gtk (and perhaps support for guile-tk),
dynamically loadable primitives (separating Scwm into smaller pieces for
a leaner memory footprint), and much much more.
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.