meo@stiatl.UUCP (Miles O'Neal) (04/28/89)
Has anyone used the Bellcore Window Manager posted a while back in comp.sources.unix? If so, how did/do you like it? What are its strengths/weaknesses? What is different between it and twm, awm, etc? --------------------------------------------------------------------- Miles O'Neal gatech!stiatl!meo
moraes@CSRI.TORONTO.EDU (Mark Moraes) (04/29/89)
The Bellcore window manager MGR is really a window system, a terminal emulator window, and a window manager in the same package. (and it fits into 240K on a Sun) (It was posted to comp.sources.unix in volume 17, 61 parts from v17i001 to v17i063 including a patch, so grab it from the nearest archive site, or by anon. ftp from bellcore.com in pub/mgr. The file MGR.summary there provides more info about it) It is: small - as I said, it is 240K, which can be reduced by 40K if you remove the snazzy startup demo. On a Sun, the size is text data bss dec hex 188416 32768 17428 238612 3a414 After a long session, with several windows, it grew to 650K (350 resident). Trying to get this thing to page is seriously hard work, even with other users on the machine (a 4M Sun 3/50)! Many "applications" are shell scripts, most others are 40-50K binaries. The total src code is about 2M, the installed subtree is about 3.5M. fast - since the terminal emulator and window manager are within the window system program, it can bring up windows instantly. Ditto for resizing and suchlike. It also starts up very quickly. Switching from window to window doesn't involve context switches. simple - you can only type in the top window, you have to click to select the window. The supported user-interface is a menu - you are allowed to specify walking menus which MGR will popup and manage on its own. No subwindows. Only fixed width fonts. There is only one type of window - the terminal emulator window, which also accepts graphics commands and queries in the form of escape sequences. (The MGR library provides macros which send these escape sequences) You can specify regions within the window to restrict the text to, for implementing scrollbars and things. There are fixed upper limits on the number of windows, menus, fonts etc. It does backing pixmaps for you. (this can grow the mgr server) MGR network transparency is sending escape sequences across rlogin. Various commands are bound to Meta key combinations - Meta-N brings up a new 80x24 window. This means you can't use the Meta key for applications like Emacs. The MGR C Library Interface document reminds one of X10 days - a 50 page document which you can read conveniently. I use it on our Suns when I want to do something quickly and don't want to wait for my X setup to start up (I start up xterms on several machines, xbiff, xclock, xpostit...) - MGR starts up as quickly as a small editor (like vi or Jove), so it isn't worth using the Sun console directly. Some of our users like it because it is fast and simple. It has occasionally died on me, at least once with a segmentation fault which I haven't traced down. Other random comments: - click to type is disconcerting for a regular X user. blit users would probably feel at home. - It doesn't send SIGWINCH so you need to run the the very vital set_termcap and set_emacs commands. I strongly recommend aliasing something like alias mgrtset "set noglob; eval `set_emacs`" for emacs users, and running it as part of your .cshrc. In itself not too major a pain (I have a similar macro for X). What is severely annoying is that it doesn't appear to have any concept of SIGWINCH - you resize a window, you have to run mgrtset again. Not nice. (Oh yes - vi users will want to run set_termcap instead; or they may want to run mgr/bin/vi which does just that, followed by vi startup) - non-window system editors (and applications can be configured to use the mouse with appropriate bindings) - click to position the mouse in vi is interesting, albeit weird. - The complete lack of feedback on window size is a pain - makes it very hard to get 80 column wide windows till you discover the shape command. You can create windows with Meta-N and then resize them if you want to make sure your windows are 80 columns wide. - Resizing windows with the mouse is a pain, both because of the lack of feedback on size in rows/cols, and because you have to literally reshape your window rather than just adjust it. (blit style) - Cut is a little awkward till you discover where the "hot-spot" on the scissors is (the upper-left corner, approx!) Paste being bound to the Meta-P key is handy.
peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) (04/30/89)
Has anyone gotten MGR up under System V? -- Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation. Business: uunet.uu.net!ficc!peter, peter@ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180. Personal: ...!texbell!sugar!peter, peter@sugar.hackercorp.com.