w9wm Version 0.4.0 Copyright 2000-2001 Benjamin Drieu. with large portions of code Copyright 1994 David Hogan. What is w9wm ? ============== w9wm is a quick & dirty hack based on 9wm, the wonderful "template" window manager made by David Hogan. 9wm is really nice for all day use (I mean, a large Emacs window covering the whole screen and a terminal to use Lynx and browse the web ;-)) provided that you do not have a large number of windows on your screen. But in some occasions it is not the case (ie. you have to telnet to 4-5 remote machines), which is painful with 9wm. This need for virtual screens motivated this about 50 lines hack. w9wm brings support for virtual screens (provided you use the second button, aka middle button to select one virtual screen) as well as for key bindings (to switch from one window to another). What is w9wm not? ================ A configurable kitchen sink. If you want to modify virtual screens behavior or so, you have to write it. Where do I get it? ================== It depends. If you are lucky you might fetch it from http://inferno.cs.univ-paris8.fr/~drieu/w9wm/. Otherwise, please drop a letter to bdrieu@april.org Some distributions might provide packages (there is a port for OpenBSD). Author ====== 9wm was written by David Hogan (dhog@cs.su.oz.au), a postgraduate student at the Basser Department of Computer Science, University of Sydney (http://www.cs.su.oz.au/basser_home.html). w9wm was written by Benjamin Drieu (bdrieu@april.org) at University of Paris 8 (http://www.cs.univ-paris8.fr/). Licence ======= w9wm is free software and uses the same licence than 9wm. Look at the README.9wm file included in this distribution to read it. How do I compile/install it? ============================ Assuming your system is correctly configured, you should only need to run xmkmf to generate the Makefile, and then run make or make install. make install.man should copy the manpage (9wm.man) to the appropriate directory. If the make fails, complaining that the function _XShapeQueryExtension does not exist, try removing the "-DSHAPE" from the Imakefile, and run xmkmf and make again. If you don't have imake, or it is misconfigured, or you would prefer not to use it, try copying the file "Makefile.no-imake" to "Makefile", then edit the definitions in this Makefile to suit your system. This may require defining suitable compilation flags for your system (normally imake does this for you). For instance, on AIX you must include "-DBSD_INCLUDES" in CFLAGS. How do I use it? ================ See the manual page for details. You should probably read the man page for 9term as well. What if I find a bug? ===================== If you find a bug on virtual screens, please email a bug report to bdrieu@april.org. If this is not related to virtual screens, please mail bug reports to 9wm-bugs@plan9.cs.su.oz.au, so that they can incorporate fixes into the next release. If you can tell them how to fix it, all the better. Known Problems/Bugs =================== 9wm tries hard to emulate 8-1/2, but isn't 100% compatible. If you are an experienced 8-1/2 user, please be patient with it. Multi-screen displays (aka "Zaphod Mode") are not supported. Fixing this requires major changes to the source, so don't expect to see this fixed for some time. One intentional difference between 9wm and 8-1/2 is in the behaviour of the menu when the last hidden item is unhidden. Under 8-1/2, when the menu is next used, it pops up with "New" selected. Under 9wm, the (new) last menu item will be selected. This is a feature. It may be confusing if you frequently switch between 9wm and 8-1/2. If you don't like this feature, email me for the one line fix. There have been some problems encountered when resizing 9term on some platforms. This turns out to be a problem in 9term (actually in libXg, to be precise). Newer versions of 9term should be immune to this, see matty@cs.su.oz.au if your 9term needs fixing. Some client programs do weird things. One of these is Frame Maker. It appears that if it has a modal dialog on the screen, then if any of its windows are current, all keypresses are redirected to the modal dialog. This is not 9wm's fault -- Frame Maker is doing this. See Also ======== ftp://ftp.cs.su.oz.au/matty/unicode/ for source to 9term (get README first) ftp://research.att.com/dist/sam/ for source && info on Rob Pike's editor "sam" ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/comp.unix.shell/rc-FAQ for information on a publically available implementation of the Plan 9 shell "rc" for unix (or look in comp.unix.shell). ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/rc for source to the abovementioned implementation of rc. ftp://research.att.com/dist/plan9doc/ ftp://research.att.com/dist/plan9man/ for information on Plan 9 (including the 8-1/2 manual entry) Acknowledgements ================ Thanks to David Hogan for the original 9wm. Please look at the README.9wm file included in this distribution to read other acknowledgements. Thanks to Erik Quanstrom for helping me discovering the wonderful Xnest and reporting a bug. Thanks to Andrew S. Midthune for his click-to-focus-passes-through-click patch. Thanks to Michael Dingler for bugs report.
