README (7383B)
1 This is David Hogan's 9wm updated to behave more like 2 Plan 9's rio. Since I cannot get approval for the changes 3 and I'd prefer not to resort to patches, I have renamed it "rio". 4 5 Current incompatibilities that would be nice to fix: 6 7 - The command-line options should be made more like Plan 9. 8 9 - Should work out a protocol between 9term and rio so that: 10 * 9term can tell rio to blue its border during hold mode 11 12 - Should change window focus on b2/b3 clicks and then 13 pass along the click event to the now-focused window. 14 15 - Should change 9term to redirect b3 clicks to rio so that rio 16 can put up the usual b3 menu. 17 18 Axel Belinfante contributed the code to handle border grabbing 19 for resize and various other improvements. 20 21 The original README is below. 22 23 - russ cox 24 rsc@swtch.com 25 30 march 2004 26 27 28 9wm Version 1.2 29 Copyright 1994-1996 David Hogan. 30 31 What is 9wm? 32 ============ 33 34 9wm is an X window manager which attempts to emulate the Plan 9 window 35 manager 8-1/2 as far as possible within the constraints imposed by X. 36 It provides a simple yet comfortable user interface, without garish 37 decorations or title-bars. Or icons. And it's click-to-type. This 38 will not appeal to everybody, but if you're not put off yet then read 39 on. (And don't knock it until you've tried it.) 40 41 One major difference between 9wm and 8-1/2 is that the latter provides 42 windows of text with a typescript interface, and doesn't need to run a 43 separate program to emulate a terminal. 9wm, as an X window manager, 44 does require a separate program. For better 8-1/2 emulation, you should 45 obtain Matthew Farrow's "9term" program (ftp://ftp.cs.su.oz.au/matty/unicode), 46 version 1.6 or later (earlier versions don't cooperate with 9wm in 47 implementing "hold mode"). Of course, you can run xterm under 9wm as well. 48 49 What is 9wm not? 50 ================ 51 52 9wm is not a virtual window manager. It is not customisable to any 53 great extent. It is not large and unwieldy, and doesn't use the X 54 toolkit. Requests to make it any of these things will be silently 55 ignored (or flamed if I have had a bad day :-) If you want tvtwm 56 or mwm, you know where to get them... 57 58 Where do I get it? 59 ================== 60 61 The latest version of 9wm is held at ftp://ftp.cs.su.oz.au/dhog/9wm 62 63 Author 64 ====== 65 66 9wm was written by David Hogan (dhog@cs.su.oz.au), a postgraduate 67 student at the Basser Department of Computer Science, University 68 of Sydney (http://www.cs.su.oz.au/~dhog/). 69 70 Licence 71 ======= 72 73 9wm is free software, and is Copyright (c) 1994-1996 by David Hogan. 74 Permission is granted to all sentient beings to use this software, 75 to make copies of it, and to distribute those copies, provided 76 that: 77 78 (1) the copyright and licence notices are left intact 79 (2) the recipients are aware that it is free software 80 (3) any unapproved changes in functionality are either 81 (i) only distributed as patches 82 or (ii) distributed as a new program which is not called 9wm 83 and whose documentation gives credit where it is due 84 (4) the author is not held responsible for any defects 85 or shortcomings in the software, or damages caused by it. 86 87 There is no warranty for this software. Have a nice day. 88 89 How do I compile/install it? 90 ============================ 91 92 Assuming your system is correctly configured, you should only need to 93 run xmkmf to generate the Makefile, and then run make or make install. 94 make install.man should copy the manpage (9wm.man) to the appropriate 95 directory. 96 97 If the make fails, complaining that the function _XShapeQueryExtension 98 does not exist, try removing the "-DSHAPE" from the Imakefile, and 99 run xmkmf and make again. 100 101 If you don't have imake, or it is misconfigured, or you would prefer 102 not to use it, try copying the file "Makefile.no-imake" to "Makefile", 103 then edit the definitions in this Makefile to suit your system. This 104 may require defining suitable compilation flags for your system 105 (normally imake does this for you). For instance, on AIX you must 106 include "-DBSD_INCLUDES" in CFLAGS. 107 108 How do I use it? 109 ================ 110 111 See the manual page for details. You should probably read the 112 man page for 9term as well. 113 114 What if I find a bug? 115 ===================== 116 117 Please mail all bug reports to 9wm-bugs@plan9.cs.su.oz.au, so 118 that I can incorporate fixes into the next release. If you can 119 tell me how to fix it, all the better. 120 121 Known Problems/Bugs 122 =================== 123 124 9wm tries hard to emulate 8-1/2, but isn't 100% compatible. If 125 you are an experienced 8-1/2 user, please be patient with it. 126 127 One intentional difference between 9wm and 8-1/2 is in the behaviour 128 of the menu when the last hidden item is unhidden. Under 8-1/2, when 129 the menu is next used, it pops up with "New" selected. Under 9wm, 130 the (new) last menu item will be selected. This is a feature. It 131 may be confusing if you frequently switch between 9wm and 8-1/2. 132 If you don't like this feature, email me for the one line fix. 133 134 There have been some problems encountered when resizing 9term on 135 some platforms. This turns out to be a problem in 9term (actually 136 in libXg, to be precise). Newer versions of 9term should be 137 immune to this, see matty@cs.su.oz.au if your 9term needs fixing. 138 139 Some client programs do weird things. One of these is Frame Maker. 140 It appears that if it has a modal dialog on the screen, then if any 141 of its windows are current, all keypresses are redirected to the 142 modal dialog. This is not 9wm's fault -- Frame Maker is doing this. 143 144 Programs like Netscape Navigator like to put riddiculously long 145 icon name properties on their windows, of the form "Netscape: blah blah". 146 There is no way that I know of to stop netscape from doing this. For this 147 reason, 9wm truncates labels at the first colon it finds. This keeps the 148 button 3 menu from becoming excessively wide. Note that with same 149 applications, you can use an iconName resource to set the label; this 150 works well for "xman", whose default icon name of "Manual Browser" 151 is a tad too long. 152 153 See Also 154 ======== 155 156 http://www.cs.su.oz.au/~dhog/ 157 The 9wm Home Page 158 159 ftp://ftp.cs.su.oz.au/matty/unicode/ 160 for source to 9term (get README first) 161 162 ftp://plan9.att.com/plan9/unixsrc/sam/ 163 for source && info on Rob Pike's editor "sam" 164 165 ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/unix-faq/shell/rc 166 for information on a publically available implementation 167 of the Plan 9 shell "rc" for unix (or look in comp.unix.shell). 168 169 ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/rc 170 for source to the abovementioned implementation of rc. 171 172 http://plan9.att.com/plan9/ 173 http://plan9.att.com/magic/man2html/1/8%c2%bd 174 for information on Plan 9 (including the 8-1/2 manual entry) 175 176 Acknowledgements 177 ================ 178 179 Thanks to Rob Pike for writing the original 8-1/2 program (and 180 before that, mux) which inspired the writing of 9wm. 181 182 Thanks to John Mackin, whose gwm "wool code" for emulating mux 183 was also an inspiration: I used it (and hacked it) until I got 184 too frustrated with gwm's large memory requirements and lack of 185 speed (sorry Colas!), and decided to write a dedicated program. 186 187 Thanks to Matthew Farrow for writing 9term. 188 189 A big thanks to Dave Edmondson for adding support for 190 multi-screen displays. 191 192 The following people helped beta test 9wm: 193 194 John Mackin 195 Noel Hunt 196 Fred Curtis 197 James Matthew Farrow 198 Danny Yee 199 Arnold Robbins 200 Byron Rakitzis 201 micro@cooper.edu