Scwm @VERSION@
This is a beta release of
Scwm, The Scheme Constraints Window Manager.
Written and maintained by:
Greg J. Badros <gjb@cs.washington.edu> and
Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@alum.mit.edu>
and other (see AUTHORS)
Web site: http://scwm.mit.edu/
Ftp directory: ftp://scwm.mit.edu/pub/scwm/
Online manual: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/gjb/scwm-doc/
(See additional specialty documentation in the sub-directory "doc/")
Scwm is the Scheme Constraints Window Manager, a highly dynamic and extensible window manager for the X Window System. Scwm embeds Guile Scheme as the configuration and extension language, and includes a sophisticated constraint solver for permitting the user to interactively specify constraints among top-level window sizes and positions. Nearly all decorations can be changed at run-time on a per-window basis. Dynamic loading of C modules is supported. Scwm is self-documenting and provides A powerful protocol for interacting with the window manager from other processes.
Features Scwm provides include:
- Full programmability
- GNOME compatibility
- GUI configurability
- sophisticated window decoration system, theme support
- integrated interaction and documentation system (Emacs or readline based)
- integration with guile-gtk widget bindings
- extensible window manager hooks, placement procedures, and more to provide the ultimate in behaviour configurability
- flexible menu system, permitting dynamically loadable menu drawing primitives
- animated window movements, resizes, and shading
- synthetic key press events (no more mouse needed to click on URLs in netscape!)
- XTest module, for "real" events under program control
- proplist module, for integration with WindowMaker proplists.
- constraint-based window layout (see README-constraints for more details and see http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/constraints/cassowary/ for information about the solver)
- IBM ViaVoice voice recognition capabilities (only on x86 GNU/Linux)
This release, although labeled beta, is reasonably stable and exceedingly useful. Many individuals, including the developers, have been using Scwm as their primary window manager for over a year. We make every effort to eliminate segmentation faults and other bugs, but make no guarantees -- use at your own risk, as always.
Scwm builds on i386-pc-linux, i386-pc-freebsd, sparc-sun-solaris, alpha-linux-unkown, mips-sgi-irix, and generally any platform where both guile and cassowary will build. We recommend using guile-1.3.4 currently. See the file INSTALL for further instructions.
There's various kinds of documentation and random info in the doc directory, and you can see some examples of what might be done in the startup files included in the sample.scwmrc/ directory. Also consider browsing the Scwm modules in the scheme/ and the example/test code in the scheme/tests/ directory. See doc/scwm-intro-tutorial.scm for a basic introduction to Scwm, Scheme, and means for interacting with and customizing your Scwm environment.
Things to look for in the near future include: an event-binding system rewrite, better support for the Cassowary constraint solving toolkit, better support for using guile-gtk (and perhaps support for guile-tk), dynamically loadable primitives (separating Scwm into smaller pieces for a leaner memory footprint), and much much more.
The copyright for the code in the Scwm and libs subdirectories is the fvwm copyright, which may be found in COPYING.FVWM. Several files may have a slightly different copyright, or be under our copyright. The files in the scheme directory are under GPL (see scheme/COPYING). The files in the doc directory are all under the copyright specified by doc/COPYRIGHT.DOC.