Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2001 13:36:46 -0500 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: parv <parv_@yahoo.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Way Off Topic: Bookmarks Message-ID: <15303.14398.341126.465755@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <20011012140629.A2239@moo.holy.cow> References: <34551253@toto.iv> <15303.11846.886398.351236@guru.mired.org> <20011012140629.A2239@moo.holy.cow>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
parv <parv_@yahoo.com> types: > this was, on the fateful occasion around Oct 12 13:54 -0400, > sent by Mike Meyer > > A scriptable environment is one of the things I miss when working on > > Unix desktops. > if by "desktop" you mean "things X Window System", then did you not > like sawfish wm which according to its docs gives the impression that > "once you know lisp, you can do almost anything"? Nope. I did look at sawfish, and forgot why I didn't like it. In any case, I've got a completely scriptable window manager that has the advantage that I can script it in my choice of languages, including lisp. I'm not sure guile is one of them, though. Does guile include CORBA bindings? > by chance, could you mean that you long for the console when in X? Nope, not that either. Before I moved my primary desktop to Unix, I worked in an environment where the OS providers GUI standards required every application to allow users to add buttons, menu entries or command that would invoke scripts that could query the application for information and issue commands back to the application. It also called for applications to allow themselves to be started and start listening for commands, so that scripts could launch them, have them do things, then exit. The system came with a standard scripting language, but the mechanism allowed scripts to be written in other languages, even ones that needed to be compiled. Kudos to Bill Hawes for creating that mechanism. In other words, it's that *every application on the desktop* could be scripted, and scripts could talk to multiple applications. The IDE I used came with an editor, but used the scripting mechanisms to interact with it, so I could configure it to talk to my favorite editor instead of the bundled one, and have my favorite editor invoke the IDE when appropriate. I built one of the best GUI UMA's I've ever had the pleasure to use on a proprietary hypertext application using nothing but scripts invoked by user-added menus. MS Windows seems to have gone furthest in that direction among current desktop systems, which is unfortunate because I can't stand the MS Windows window manager - among other things. CORBA provides a perfect mechanism - even better than the one I was used to - but the standards neglect desktop use, instead aiming at large distributed systems. Gnome has a lot of hooks in place for CORBA, but the applications developers seem to be ignoring them. Not to mention that I want a window manager that's stays out of my way, which describes none of the Gnome window managers I know of. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Q: How do you make the gods laugh? A: Tell them your plans. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?15303.14398.341126.465755>