What Happened to 5dwm? 38
CoolVibe asks: "Remember that project called 5dwm? It was supposed to give us free Unix users a Magic Desktop clone. The project seems to have died. What happened to it? Are there any mirrors? As far as I can remember, this project wasn't open source. Too bad, because if it was, we would have a MD clone. Anyone who remembers working on a SGI machine (I used to use an O2) probably has fond memories of the Magic Desktop for IRIX. If anyone from SGI is listening, how about porting that fantastic piece of work to Linux and the *BSD's?"
Some comments (Score:3, Interesting)
I also posted an article about this on Advogato here [advogato.org]. I got some replies on that, and one person attended me to here [dnetc.org] where you can find a copy of the 5dwm stuff.
About the functionality of this thing, it's not just a WM. It's a desktop environment. If you ever worked on a SGI machine, you'd agree it was (well, arguably) the best damn internet workstation out there. Sure, KDE and Gnome fill in a huge gap here, but there is much to be learned from how the IMD is put together.
I hope the people at SGI see this and decide to either opensource this thing, or to provide linux binaries. I know, it's idle hope, but a man can dream, can't he? I'd love to see this on my desktop at home.
Should copy the good stuff from 4DWM (Score:3, Interesting)
One is MWM style raise/drag behavior. Even though I thought it was strange when I first encountered it, I quickly learned to use it, and it is obvious from trying to use modern systems how much superior it was. The rules were simple: the only thing that raised a window was a quick click in the window border. If you dragged or resized the window, it did not raise! Also (vitally important) if you clicked inside the window it did not raise.
Basically if windows raise on clicks it makes it impossible to use overlapping windows. The real horror of today's designs is that nobody seems to realize this, and think all kinds of actually retro ideas ("tiled" windows, "dockable" windows, and "MDI") are "innovations" and not just work-arounds for this bug. If tiled windows were so great they would have been adopted from the Andrew system (or the first Windows systems) for the entire screen. The truth is that the human mind is not set up to deal with objects that change size based on stuff other than the contents of the objects, and this is very unfriendly and makes it hard to spacially locate things. The other scary thing is that every time this is proposed somebody says "but that will be user-unfriendly because it is not EXACTLY like Windows!!!". I believe these are the same Whiners who keep saying "Linux does not innovate".
Another thing is to stop locking "parent" and "child" windows together. This is really the same complaint, but there are NO modern window managers that don't have this bug. What happens is that if you raise a child window, they raise the parent as well, rather than leaving the parent where it was. The parent/child relationship should specify an order but does not mean they have to be next to each other. Again this bug prevents overlapping windows, unless you make all of the windows children of some large and useless parent window.
Also Irix's terminal emulator was a lot better. Especially the methods use to select text and end-of-line. On xterm, kterm, and gterm and the OS/X Terminal app I have to be really careful when trying to select text, and I almost always get it one character off on the end. For some reason the algorithim used by Irix worked perfectly.