larswm, a window manager


an iconic screenshot of a desktop being managed by larswm

larswm

The original larswm was written by Lars Bernhardsson, as a derivative to 9wm.

The great thing about larswm is that it really does what a window manager is supposed to do: manage windows. In contrast to other programs of the same category it does its job mostly automatically by dividing the screen between different windows through a simple rule. It does not require the user to intervene to place windows appropriately. In that respect it is like the classic Oberon GUI. It has no fancy grafics not even titlebars but a simple textual status line at the bottom of the screen. It takes a while getting used to and some may never want to try this, but I definitely think it was worth it.

cripting the window manager

I am currently experimenting with hooking up larswm and Guile (a gnu Scheme implementation) to make the window manager scriptable. So far upon redrawing the status bar a Scheme procedure read from an external file is evaluated and its result appended to the bar text. Not very exciting so far, but the next thing to do is export larswm internal functions to Scheme and to implement hooks that Scheme procedures can be attached to. I also plan to extend larsremote so Scheme procedures can be invoked in the windowmanager like in Emacs. Finally I plan to use Scheme to store the configuration. In the course of working on this I also converted the build process to use Automake and Autoconf.

ource

For the impatiently interested I provide a current snapshot of larswm with trivial Guile support.


Björn Gohla
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