DonHopkins
a month ago
0
3
Here's an X11 window manager, with pie menus and tabbed windows, entirely written in object oriented NeWS PostScript, from around 1991:

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/owm.ps.txt

And some design notes and emails on that NeWS based window manager for X11 windows:

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/i39l.txt

It incorporated NeWS tabbed windows written in PostScript, which could wrap around X11 windows (and frame NeWS windows too of course):

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/win/tab.ps

And NeWS pie menus written in PostScript, which you could pop up on tabbed window frames and manage X11 windows (and use in NeWS apps too of course):

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/win/pie.ps

There was also a virtual large scrolling desktop, and virtual multi-screen "rooms", both purely written in PostScript, which all plugged together with the tabbed windows and pie menus and X window manager seamlessly. They were all independent of each other and could be used separately, but worked together synergistically. Take that, ICCCM! ;)

Also here's a (pre-ICCCM, pre-X11) X10 window manager with pie menus, written in C and scripted in Forth, from around 1986:

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/piemenu/uwm/fuwm-main.f

And some of my thoughts on X-Windows and ICCCM window management in general:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...

>In summary, ICCCM is a technological disaster: a toxic waste dump of broken protocols, backward compatibility nightmares, complex nonsolutions to obsolete nonproblems, a twisted mass of scabs and scar tissue intended to cover up the moral and intellectual depravity of the industry’s standard naked emperor.

>Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes." -Jamie Zawinski

agumonkeya month ago
First time I ever get the chance to see object postcript/forth, thank you
DonHopkinsagumonkeya month ago
Thank you for checking it out! It was fun to write and run. But we couldn't talk Sun into letting us ship it for some reason! ;) Here's some more context and opinions about ICCCM (I39L), TkWM, OWM, xinit, and piewm:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/x-windows/i39l.html

Here's a much better example of NeWS object oriented PostScript user interface code, written as a developer demo with lots of comments, and even a manual entry (which shipped with SVR4):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-pizzatool-2a7992b4c797

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.6.txt

I just read over the OWM NeWS X11 window manager for the first time in decades, and rediscovered a little easter egg I'd completely forgotten about:

It looks for your X11 XCalc window, and wraps two levels of its sub-windows in ClassXClientCanvas, then puts the window containing the buttons into the list of Framebuffers, so then the window manager wraps all your calculator's buttons in window frames, then you can resize them and move them around and iconify them!

I'll add some comments:

    /FrameBuffers [ % Make a list of framebuffers to manage their X11 sub-windows.

        % Include all the top level root canvases (screens) 
        # except the "global root" (which contains all the screens).
        rootcanvases {
            dup /Parent get globalroot ne { pop } if
        } forall

        % Loop over all the child windows of the current framebuffer
        framebuffer /TopChild get {
          dup null eq { pop exit } if % Stop loop when done.
          dup null eq { pop } { % Not sure why it's testing the same thing again but there you go.
            dup /WM_NAME 0 s xgetproperty { % is it an X window?
              pop pop pop % It is! Discard the stuff we don't need.
              (Calculator) anchorsearch { % Is it a calculator window?
                pop pop % It is! Discard the stuff we don't need.
                /new ClassXClientCanvas send % Wrap it so we can play with it from NeWS.
                /TopChild get % Get its first child (the inner calculator window that has all the buttons).
                /new ClassXClientCanvas send % Wrap it too so we can play with it from NeWS.
                dup /Framebuffer 1 index soften put % Poke it so it looks like its parent is a framebuffer.
                % Thanks to the "dup" we will leave the calculator sub-window containing all the buttons
                % in the list of framebuffers, so the window manager knows about it,
                % and wraps all its children (the buttons) in window frames! 
                % So you get a NeWS window frame wrapping an X Calculator window wrapping an X calculator 
                % sub-window wrapping NeWS window frames wrapping X window buttons!
                exit % My work here is done! MOO HAA HAA!!!
              } { pop } ifelse
            } if
          } ifelse
          /CanvasBelow get % Check next window.
        } loop
    ] def
The practical reason I did that was because XCalc would get totally fucked up when you resized it again and again and again and again and again and again, especially small sizes, because the Athena Widget layout manager was a piece of shit, and it repeatedly scaled the initial grid layout in floating point, then rounded the window positions and sizes to integers, so they would drift a little bit each time, especially when small.

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/x-windows/XCalc.gif

That amused us X-Windows hating PostScript programmers on the NeWS team so much that we would laugh and laugh and roll on the floor while repeatedly resizing XCalc again and again until it looked like it got beat up in a street fight. Then we would feel sorry for XCalc, and wanted a way to repair it.

So the obvious solution was to put window frames around all the buttons, so you could resize them and lay them out nicely however you wanted. And if there was a digit or math operation you never needed, you could close it into an icon, and you could even zoom your favorite digits or math operations to "full screen" (the size of the calculator window)!

There is nothing about ICCCM that says you have to run the window manager on a root window. It's actually possible to do that with any ICCCM window manager, you just hack it so you can pass it a window id to manage instead of the root window as a command line argument, figure out the window id of the calculator with some X utility whose name I forgot (xwininfo?), and then it will do its thing on the calculator buttons. I had previously hacked OLWM do to that with a few lines of code, but of course we wanted our user friendly NeWS based X11 window manager to automatically support wrapping NeWS window frames (including tabbed window frames and pie menus) around XCalc buttons.

anthk DonHopkinsa month ago
Didn't Xaw3D solve the issue on xcalc's geometry for a while?