mwitmer / Guile Wm

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                            GUILE-WM


                          Mark Witmer
                      [email protected]
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Table of Contents ─────────────────

1 Overview 2 Why? 3 What's Actually Implemented 4 What's Not Implemented .. 4.1 Wish List .. 4.2 Even Crazier Wish List 5 Sample 6 Installation and Prerequisites

1 Overview ══════════

Guile-WM is a framework for creating an X window manager (or any other X application, really) and a set of useful modules designed for that purpose. Users are encouraged to pick and choose from ones presently available and contribute their own as well!

Guile-WM relies /heavily/ on its user init file. In fact, it won't do anything on its own without one. The intention is to provide something 100% configurable.

2 Why? ══════

Guile Scheme is just so much fun to work with, I wanted to build my house out of it. (Also, StumpWM won't work in my Linux distribution right now. And I find LOOP macros unsettling for some reason.)

I didn't want to build a WM on top of xlib. It's obsolete, or should be, anyway. XCB is great, and when I saw that it comes with XML files that describe the X protocol so that you can easily implement an X client in a different language, I decided to build the whole X client stack in Scheme. Why not? So I made Guile XCB. And then, finally, I got to work on this.

3 What's Actually Implemented ═════════════════════════════

• keymaps/minibuffer/user-defined commands: The usual emacs-style stuff. • A tiling window manager inspired by Stumpwm, as well as a drag/drop window manager inspired by tinywm • Built-in repl: make changes to the WM while it's running, talk to the X server directly (if you're into that kind of thing), integrate with Geiser in Emacs, etc. (Note: if you call a procedure that talks to the X server, use the metacommand ,post to evalute the expression. That way it'll run inside the event loop on the other thread). • Some icccm support • And more! It's completely open, so you could implement whatever window-management paradigm you like.

4 What's Not Implemented ════════════════════════

There's a lot more I'd like to do, but as you can see, it gets progressively more grandiose and, um… crazy, perhaps.

4.1 Wish List ─────────────

• Some kind of window decoration • Built-in replacements for those little X utility programs (xmodmap, xsetbg, etc.) I did part of xrandr as a proof-of-concept. • A status bar/modeline type thing • Antialiased fonts! guile-pango would be good for this. • Whatever else you want… ideas (and implementations) welcome.

4.2 Even Crazier Wish List ──────────────────────────

• Implement enough of a widget toolkit to actually run Guile Emacs inside of Guile-WM all on Guile XCB. You would basically be running a Lisp-machine at that point and all of your friends will be jealous. • Add support for XInput2 to Guile XCB w/touch gestures and whatnot and build a hackable mobile device interface. Isn't it a tragedy that smartphones are becoming the most common type of computer, but you can't really hack on them? Real XCB does support XInput2 now, so I'm running out of excuses… • Build a WM on top of Wayland. That would require a Scheme Wayland client, which could be built along the lines of Guile XCB, since the Wayland projects comes with the same kind of XML spec files that XCB uses.

5 Sample ════════

An annotated sample init file is included with the distribution as "wm-init-sample.scm". It demonstrates how to set up the configurable values in the available modules. Copy it to ~/.guile-wm to try it out.

6 Installation and Prerequisites ════════════════════════════════

You can use the typical ./configure, make, make install chain to build Guile-WM.

Guile-WM requires Guile XCB and the latest release of Guile (2.0.9).