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Because the old name (`Sawmill') was already being used by another company, who were in the process of registering it as a trademark.
The rename should be mostly painless, all old binaries still work for the time being, but will be phased out over time. Where before you would execute a program called sawmill*, replace it by sawfish*. E.g. sawmill becomes sawfish, and sawmill-client becomes sawfish-client.
Your ~/.sawmill directory will automatically be renamed ~/.sawfish unless it would overwrite an existing file. Both ~/.sawfishrc and ~/.sawmillrc will be checked currently (though only one will be actually loaded).
My apologies for any inconvenience caused.
Well I had to choose something! And hopefully it satisfies the main requirements:
This is exactly what it's supposed to do. Sawfish is a window manager and as such is not responsible for setting the background, starting programs or displaying a pager—these can all be done using separate applications (e.g. by using a desktop environment such as GNOME).
The default menu binding is somewhat obscure; you must middle-click on the background to bring up the menus. (If you have a two-button mouse, try clicking both buttons simultaneously)
If, after reading this, you still think that sawfish isn't working, please send mail describing the problem to the sawfish mailing list sawfish@lists.eazel.com
There are several files controlling this:
This file is loaded after sawmill-defaults, but before .sawfishrc.
If a ~/.sawfishrc file exists, it prevents sawmill-defaults from being loaded. But it's sawmill-defaults that loads some of the common window manager features, so add the line
(require 'sawmill-defaults)
to your .sawfishrc file if you want to start with all the standard features loaded.
sawfish-client program?
This allows you to connect to a window manager process and evaluate arbitrary Lisp forms. Do `sawfish-client -?' for more details (`sawfish-client -' for a read-eval-print loop)
By default you can only connect from the host running the wm (through a
unix-domain socket). To enable the network based server, evaluate the
lisp form (server-net-init).
Note however that this connects through the X server, meaning that anyone who can open windows on your display can also execute any Lisp code on the host running the window manager (and by extension, execute any program).
So don't run the net server with X access control disabled (unless you're not connected to a network)
Bind a key to the `run-shell-command' command; remember to enter the shell command you want to execute in the string entry in the `Edit binding' dialog window.
Bind the event Button1-Click1 in the window-keymap to the
raise-window-and-pass-through-click command
See the `Popup Menus' node in the Info manual (see Popup Menus)
Either execute the command `info sawfish', or enter the Info mode within Emacs (C-h i) and type g (sawfish) RET.
If you're using GNOME, then try executing `gnome-help-browser info:sawfish'.
See the `Window Frames' node of the Info manual (see Window Frames)
Basically though, create a directory ~/.sawfish/themes/foo where foo is the name of your theme. Then copy any images into this directory and create a file theme.jl that will be loaded to initialise the theme
The configuration tool will display the contents of a file called README in the directory (but make it 80-column text, and only a few lines)
Recent versions of sawfish include a program sawfish-themer that
allows simple themes to be created using a GTK+ interface. Ian McKellar
has created GimpMill:
GimpMill is a GIMP plugin written in Python using James Henstrige's really cool Python GIMP bindings. It allows the construction of Sawmill themes within The GIMP - extending the GIMP interface to allow theme creation like the GAP extends it to allow animation creation.
GimpMill is available from http://www.yakk.net/projects.gimpmill.html
There's no automatic translation available. Get the images used in the window border, then write a theme.jl file telling the window manager how they are used to form a window frame
See the themes/brushed-metal directory for an example, and the Info manual for the documentation
Thanks to those nice people at themes.org, there's now http://sawmill.themes.org/ for your theming pleasure
There was a problem with older versions of the gtk-engines
package preventing engine based themes working with several interpreted
languages. Get the latest gtk-engines from
ftp://ftp.gnome.org/
Mainly because I'm lazy; I had already written rep, and therefore understood it completely, whereas I have never used GUILE. Also, rep has some features not available in GUILE (byte-code compilation, autoloading, built-in event-loop, ...)
But before you flame me: yes I do think scheme is a more elegant language
Possibly. But only if it can be written in Lisp, or doesn't conflict with the overall design aims.
These aims are to build a lightweight, generally applicable, set of core window management functions, then write all high-level functionality as Lisp extensions
No. This can easily be done by a separate application (e.g. with the
GNOME hints, simply monitor property _WIN_WORKSPACE on the root
window).
Yes. See http://lists.eazel.com/mailman/listinfo/ for subscription instructions and archived messages.
From Ryan Pavlik rpav@mythosource.org:
Sawmill has an irc channel too! It's on EFNet, and called (of all crazy things), #sawmill. So break out your irc clients, or hop on over if you're already addicted. Theme, lisp, general sawmill, and most other random discussion welcome.If you need an EFNet server, check www.efnet.net for a listing.
Sawfish works stably on Solaris, but you may need to do two things:
imlib_config,
the MIT-SHM option is on the `Rendering' page)
If you don't have the option `give focus to windows even when they haven't asked for it' checked (group Focus/Advanced), then windows that don't ask for focus don't get it.
Windows ask to receive focus by setting their WM_HINTS property appropriately; for example if I xprop a gnome-terminal:
WM_HINTS(WM_HINTS):
Client accepts input or input focus: True
Initial state is Normal State.
window id # of group leader: 0x5c00001
It seems that there is a problem with these applets that only occurs after restarting sawfish–they seem to lose track of the current window states.
The simplest way to correct this is to execute the following shell commands:
$ save-session
$ killall panel
(assuming you have a session manager to restart the panel afterwards!)
It means that you're trying to execute Lisp code that was compiled for an outdated version of the Lisp virtual machine. Recompile any Lisp files that you have installed locally.
Use the shell command:
sawfish --batch -l compiler -f compile-batch files...
where files... are the names of the files you want to compile. They will normally have .jl suffixes, the compiler will create associated files with .jlc suffixes containing the compiled Lisp code.