@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, huh, maybe it was just my GNOME 2 themes back then that didn’t show the icon. 🤔

I like the looks of your window manager. That’s using Wayland, right?

Oh, no. It’s still X11. All my recent Wayland comments resulted from me trying to switch, but I think it’s still too early. Being unable to use QEMU (because it can’t capture the mouse pointer) is a pretty big blocker for me. This is completely broken, it just happens to be unnoticeable with modern guest OSes, so it’s probably not a priority for devs.

(Not to mention that I would have to fork and substantially extend dwl in order to “replicate” my X11 WM. And then, after having done that, I’d have to follow upstream Wayland development, for which I don’t have the resources. Things would need to slow down before I can do that.)

all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1

Heh. I’ve been using tiling WMs for ~15 years now, so it’s actually kind of refreshing to see something different for a change. 😅

Probably close to the older Windowses.

That particular theme is a ripoff of OS/2 Warp 3: https://movq.de/v/6c2a948882/s.png 😅

We ran some similar brownish color scheme (don’t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98

Oh god. Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of those, either. 🥴

@movq@www.uninformativ.de According to this screenshot, KDE still shows good old application icons: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/KDE_Plasma_5.21_Breeze_Twilight_screenshot.png

And GNOME used to have them, too: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Gnome-2-22_%284%29.png

I like the looks of your window manager. That’s using Wayland, right? The only thing on this screenshot to critique is all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1 At least the file browser. 8-)

This drives me nuts when my workmates share their screens. I really don’t get it how people can work like that. You can’t even read the whole line in the IDE or log viewer with all the expanded side bars. And then there’s 200 pixels on the left and another 300 pixels on the right where the desktop wallpaper shows. Gnaa! There’s the other extreme end when somebody shares their ultra wide screen and I just have a “regularish” 16:10 monitor and don’t see shit, because it’s resized way too tiny to fit my width. Good times. :-D

Sorry for going off on a tangent here. :-) Back to your WM: It has the right mix of being subtle and still similar to motif. Probably close to the older Windowses. My memory doesn’t serve me well, but I think they actually got it fairly good in my opinion. Your purple active window title looks killer. It just fits so well. This brown one (https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-07-22/0/leafpads.png) gives me also classic vibes. Awww. We ran some similar brownish color scheme (don’t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98 for some time on the family computer. I remember other people visting us not liking these colors. :-D

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org True, at least old versions of KDE had icons:

https://movq.de/v/0e4af6fea1/s.png

GNOME, on the other hand, didn’t, at least to my old screenshots from 2007:

https://www.uninformativ.de/desktop/2007%2D05%2D25%2D%2Dgnome2%2Dlaptop.png

I switched to Linux in 2007 and no window manager I used since then had icons, apparently. Crazy. An icon-less existence for 18 years. (But yeah, everything is keyboard-driven here as well and there are no buttons here, either.)

Anyway, my draft is making progress:

https://movq.de/v/5b7767f245/s.png

I do like this look. 😊

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I haven’t used KDE or GNOME for ages, but I’m sure KDE at least used to show application icons in the title bars. They proabably still do. But then, one could argue that KDE is mimicking Windows. I never thought like that, I always found KDE way superior, because I was able to configure it like a madman.

In i3, I don’t have any application icons. I remember missing them at the beginning. But I don’t even have the classical minimize, maximize and close buttons in the title bar either. Just the title. Being mostly keyboard driven and a tiling window manager, these buttons are not super useful, anyway.

I was drafting support for showing “application icons” in my window manager, i.e. the Firefox icon in the titlebar:

https://movq.de/v/0034cc1384/s.png

Then I realized: Wait a minute, lots of applications don’t set an icon? And lots of other window managers don’t show these icons, either? Openbox, pekwm, Xfce, fvwm, no icons.

Looks like macOS doesn’t show them, either?!

Has this grown out of fashion? Is this purely a Windows / OS/2 thing?

Since Wayland compositors handle input devices on a lower level than X11 window managers, every compositor has to figure out on their own what a “mouse wheel click” is:

• https://github.com/labwc/labwc/issues/1068
  
• https://github.com/labwc/labwc/pull/2933
  

(I think “Wayland compositor” is a misnomer. They are full-blown display servers that also do compositing, plus Wayland window management, plus X11 window management.)

One can only hope that all this eventually gets moved into the wlroots library. (I’m not sure if that’s possible, nor if people would want that.)

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, this really could use a proper definition or a “manifest”. 😅 Many of these ideas are not very wide spread. And I haven’t come across similar projects in all these years.

Let’s take the farbfeld image format as an example again. I think this captures the “spirit” quite well, because this isn’t even about code.

This is the entire farbfeld spec:

farbfeld is a lossless image format which is easy to parse, pipe and compress. It has the following format:

╔════════╤═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Bytes  │ Description                                             ║
╠════════╪═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ 8      │ "farbfeld" magic value                                  ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (width)                      ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (height)                     ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ [2222] │ 4x16-Bit BE unsigned integers [RGBA] / pixel, row-major ║
╚════════╧═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

The RGB-data should be sRGB for best interoperability and not alpha-premultiplied.

(Now, I don’t know if your screen reader can work with this. Let me know if it doesn’t.)

I think these are some of the properties worth mentioning:

• The spec is extremely short. You can read this in under a minute and fully understand it. That alone is gold.
  
• There are no “knobs”: It’s just a single version, it’s not like there’s also an 8-bit color depth version and one for 16-bit and one for extra large images and one that supports layers and so on. This makes it much easier to implement a fully compliant program.
  
• Despite being so simple, it’s useful. I’ve used it in various programs, like my window manager, my status bars, some toy programs like “tuxeyes” (an Xeyes variant), or Advent of Code.
  
• The format does not include compression because it doesn’t need to. Just use something like bzip2 to get file sizes similar to PNG.
  
• It doesn’t cover every use case under the sun, but it does cover the most important ones (imho). They have discussed using something other than RGBA and decided it’s not worth the trouble.
  
• They refrained from adding extra baggage like metadata. It would have needlessly complicated things.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org hey pascal bro! My first coding class was with an old Borland Turbo Pascal. I made my own little window manager for the assignments for class.

The teacher didn’t appreciate it much since I had to print out the code to turn it in. My Yatzee game was a stack of pages. 🤪

exwm: Emacs X Windows Manager
EXWM (Emacs X Window Manager) is a full-featured tiling X window manager for Emacs built on top of XELB. ↫ exwm GitHub page It supports both tiling and stacking windows, dynamic workspaces, RandR, a system tray, and a lot more. XELB stands for X protocol Emacs Lisp Binding, and it’s a “pure Elisp implementation of X11 protocol based on the XML description files from XCB project”. ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @bender@twtxt.net It already is a tiling window manager, but some windows can’t be tiled in a meaningful way. I admit that I’m mostly thinking about QEMU or Wine here: They run at a fixed size and can’t be tiled, but I still want to put them in “full screen” mode (i.e., hide anything else).

@movq@www.uninformativ.de You could also just use a tiling window manager. :-) As a bonus, it doesn’t waste dead space, the window utilizes the entire screen. To also get rid of panels and stuff, put the window in fullscreen mode.

Thinking about adding a little “focus” feature to my window manager: It hides all but one window, no wallpaper, no bars.

It would turn this

https://movq.de/v/a75eb68770/a0.jpg

into this

https://movq.de/v/a75eb68770/a1.jpg

or this

https://movq.de/v/a75eb68770/b0.jpg

into this:

https://movq.de/v/a75eb68770/b1.jpg

🤔

it’s been while since I’d stopped #window-manager hopping and just settled with #Herbstluftwm but I’m NGL, the River #Wayland compositor is starting to grow on me… I’m still not sure if it’s just me but something about it feels clean and snappy. The shortcuts in the vanilla/example configuration feel a bit clunky, but then again, it’s just me being used to the same old ones I keep adopting and replicating across WMs. I’ve got 0 energy for ricing so I’ll just roll with the vanilla config as is (maybe add in a short-cut for a launcher but that will be it).

Genode OS Framework 25.02 released
The prime feature is the continuation of the multi-monitor topic of the previous release, covering multi-monitor window management and going as far as seamlessly integrating multi-monitor virtual machines (Section Multi-monitor window management and virtual machines). The second and long anticipated feature is the Chromium engine version 112 in combination with Qt 6.6.2, which brings our port of the Falkon web browser on par with the modern web (Section Qt, WebE … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net

What’s made you unlock twitch.tv?
A couple of events where my only choices for watching them are: Twitch, Youtube or Fartbook.
What are you doing differently?
TL;DR: I stopped going there unless I have to for the reason above.

I used to spend Waaaaay too much time on the platform. I had a whole setup using Streamlink, MPV and Chatterino where sometimes, I’d have up to 10 concurrent open streams all day long on a secondary monitor (thanks to tiling window managers’ magic), some I was interested in watching, some I moderated for a couple of friends and some I’ve had open just for support (helping new streamers in the community with their numbers till they take off and such). Theeen something happened to one of my loved ones, so I had to stop all the nonsense and spend that time and attention with the person who deserves it the most. I blocked the platform at first since I had a habit to type twit... as soon as I opened a browser 😅 (addiction is real) and now I don’t. (That reflex got replaced with typing twtxt... instead 😂)

This Zen-Browser is actually not bad! 🤯

• Based on Firefox instead of Chromium.
  
• Got tiling pans when you need them… (just like a tiling window manager).
  
• I can hide the Tabs and Nav-Bar with a single short-cut!! AKA Compact Mode …

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com I’m definitely putting that in the list. I like tmux but I just can’t wrap my head around the controls. This looks more like a tiling window manager.

QOTD: What do you host on your home server? How do you host it? Are you using containers? VMs? Did you install any management interface or do you just SSH in? What OS does it run?

Mine runs Arch (btw) and hosts a handful of things using Docker. Adguard Home, http://mckinley2nxomherwpsff5w37zrl6fqetvlfayk2qjnenifxmw5i4wyd.onion/, and some other things. NFS, Flexo, and Wireguard (peer and bounce server in my personal network) are outside Docker. I have a hotkey in my window manager that spawns a terminal on my server using SSH. It makes things very easy and I highly recommend it.

I am thinking about replacing Docker with Podman because the Common Wisdom seems to say it’s better. I don’t really know if it is or isn’t.

Also, how much of your personal infrastructure is on IPv6? I think all the software I use supports both, but I’ve mostly been using IPv4 because it’s easier to remember the addresses. I’ve been working for the last couple days on making it IPv6-only.

I’m trying to switch from Konversation to irssi. Let’s see how that goes. Any irssiers out there who can recommend specific settings or scripts? I already got myself trackbar.pl and nickcolor.pl as super-essentials. Also trying window_switcher.pl. Somehow my custom binds for Ctrl+1/2/3/etc. to switch to window 1/2/3/etc. doesn’t do anything: { key = "^1"; id = "change_window"; data = "1"; } (I cannot use the default with Alt as this is handled by my window manager). Currently, I’m just cycling with Ctrl+N/P. Other things to solve in the near future:

• better, more colorful and compact theme (just removed clock from statusbar so far)
  
• getting bell/urgency hints working on arriving messages
  
• nicer tabs in status bar, maybe even just channel names and no indexes
  
• decluster status bar with user and channel modes (I never cared about those in the last decade)