| I've just spent hours messing with Window Maker. I was a NeXT admirer as a teen, so this is A. Maz. Ing! Your answer was really helpful. I'd already figured out how to just globally override window decorations (Firefox became draggable again!) but I think your way of doing it on a case-by-case basis may be better. One of the most useful new things so far IMHO is being able to just move around or resize a window (without having to hold on either the title bar or a corner) by holding down Alt and left- or right-dragging. (Do GNOME's standard window managers provide anything like that?) That plus live move/resize has been amazing. But now I actually want to assign those to another mouse button; basically I want my "back" mouse button to be another Alt key I guess. It looks like "imwheel" might be able to do this remapping? I haven't finished investigating yet. App discovery- Unlike the nicety of Gnome, which seems to autodiscover any newly installed apps, I seem to have to manually add icons for things or to put things in the right click menu. Is there any way to facilitate this? For example in Gnome when I hit the Windows key, the view pulls back and I get a search box with all my installed app icons shown below, which I can then page through. Anything like this in WindowMaker? Mini-applications- There's not a whole lot on this but it sounds neat- basically the icon becomes an output region so I could have things like a Current Weather icon; it seems they are incompatible with Gnome? Any idea how I might be able to mess with that in NixOS/Window Maker? Minimization- There's no clear place minimized things go, although they still can be brought back with alt-tab. Actually, I somehow lost the minimization widget in the menu bar I just noticed; the native controls (which I forced across everything in order to get draggability back) might not have one. I can windowshade title bars (hah, like old MacOS!) Actually maybe the whole concept of "minimizing" is off: Alt-H will "hide", which is fine actually. Uncluttered =) I like that all the config files are text files, but I tried to comment out some lines in the menu bar config and it borked it and I subsequently ended up accidentally losing the changes I'd made (oops.. I assumed VSCode would remember unsaved files, as it tends to, but in this case it did not... maybe because windowmaker KILL's it when you close it, and I should have Exit'ed from within it instead?). So for the time being I decided to source-control the whole thing by setting GNUSTEP_USER_ROOT = "\${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/GNUstep"; in the environment session vars and since my XDG_CONFIG_HOME is source-controlled, that made that trivial. So now I can manually edit these with aplomb. Nitrogen will let me set the desktop background but it won't stick... Default sound input/output devices- Is there a nice GUI to set these?? I tried using "pacmd" to set the default sink but it didn't "take" (apparently, I may have to reboot?) |
You can have scripts that generate menu entries dynamically which can be useful for that. If you have xdg_menu installed (check your distro) you can use it to make a menu for all available .desktop files. To do that open preferences, go to the menu editor, drag and drop a "Generated Submenu" entry, for the Command use "xdg_menu --format WindowMaker" and then click Save. You may need to restart Window Maker to work (should be a command in the right click menu).
> Mini-applications
These are "dockapps" and they're basically just tiny X windows. You can find a bunch of them at https://www.dockapps.net/
Note that most of them need to be compiled from source code. Also some are quite old (there are even some from the late 90s) and use old APIs, though most stuff that mention you can get from "repo.or.cz/dockapps.git" should work.
> Minimization
Minimization (actually called "miniaturization" for some reason :-P) should put windows in the bottom left corner, though i think this is configurable. Running applications can be hidden and hidden applications have a single "dot" at the bottom left corner of their tile - doubleclicking the tile will show them. Tiles with three dots at the bottom left corner are applications you haven't launched and double clicking them will launch them - in which case the dots are removed (double clicking the tile will focus the application) unless you hide it (in which case there will be one dot).
> I like that all the config files are text files
> Nitrogen will let me set the desktop background but it won't stick...
Window Maker has a GUI configuration editor (called WMPrefs) that should cover pretty much all options in the config file so you don't have to edit it by hand.
> Default sound input/output devices- Is there a nice GUI to set these?? I tried using "pacmd" to set the default sink but it didn't "take" (apparently, I may have to reboot?)
I'm using the alsamixer dockapp, though it is really only for volume. There might be a better dockapp but personally i've been calling pavucontrol via the Run dialog to switch audio devices.