WindowLab
WindowLab is a small and simple window manager of novel design. It has a click-to-focus but not raise-on-focus policy, a window resizing mechanism that allows one or many edges of a window to be changed in one action, and an innovative menubar that shares the same part of the screen as the taskbar. Window titlebars are prevented from going off the edge of the screen by constraining the mouse pointer. When appropriate, the pointer is also constrained to the taskbar/menubar in order to make target menu items easier to hit.
| Tags | Desktop Environment Window Manager |
|---|---|
| Licenses | GPL |
| Operating Systems | POSIX |
| Implementation | C |
Recent releases
- 12 Nov 2006 17:17
Changes: If no window has focus, focus is now given to new windows, and if the focused window is closed and no previous window has ever had focus, focus is given to the first client. Fonts are now closed properly on exit, some compiler warnings were fixed, changes were made to the Makefile, and many other miscellaneous changes were made.
- 16 Oct 2005 16:24
Changes: Scrolling the mouse wheel in the taskbar now task switches. A crash was fixed that occurred on the BSDs (and presumably on other systems without /proc/self/exe), and another crash was fixed that occurred when there were no focused windows and alt + F12 was pressed. Events are always replayed rather than sometimes being eaten. New windows are no longer given focus. The TODO file was added.
- 19 Jul 2005 22:29
Changes: The executable has been made relocatable. Double clicking on a window's titlebar now toggles its depth. A segfault when using realloc() with menu items was fixed. A bug with applications that start in iconic mode was fixed. A -display option was added. The initial position and size hints in WM_HINTS are now ignored since they are flagged as obsolete in the manpage of SetWMHints.
- 21 Jun 2005 08:12
Changes: More resizing bugs were fixed. Window borders are now taken into account properly, and some XFT font issues were resolved.
- 23 May 2005 03:24
Changes: Bugs that prevented windows from being made smaller from a side that was at the edge of the screen and that caused the first clients taskbar button to disappear when all clients were hidden were fixed.
- All comments
Recent commentsRe: Strange Concept
> Strange concept of no raise-on-focus policy.
It comes from the Amiga and makes a good deal of sense once you get used to it. On the Amiga the menu is at the top of the screen and is used by whichever app has focus (like on the Mac), but it seems the Amiga guys wanted to be able to give focus to windows without automatically raising them (unlike the Mac (and Windows) which use click-to-focus and raise-on-focus). That left the Unix style focus-follows-mouse model, but this would be terrible to use on a system with a shared menu at the top of the screen. Just imagine trying to work on a screen full of windows - you might be working on an app at the bottom of the screen and to use the menu you'd have to get the mouse pointer to the top of the screen without passing over another window!). I believe this is currently the cause of a lot of frustration for Unix people who bought new Macs running OS X and are trying to hack together a usable implementation of focus-follows-mouse!
Try using WindowLab for a while and see if you can get used to it. For me (and many others) it's a much nicer way of working.
Strange Concept
Strange concept of no raise-on-focus policy.