Most of my workspaces are tiling (bspwm), but I have one where all windows are floated.

This is showcasing my own (very minimalist; ~300 lines) unreleased desktop manager written in pure Ruby, using a Ruby font renderer and Ruby X11 client library (both on github), and showing a custom menu written in Ruby that auto-populates with actions based on directory contents, and showing my Ruby terminal showcasing double-width and double-height support (xterm has it, but few others), and a window showing me editing my Ruby text editor with itself…

Oh, and Polybar. One of the terminals is st - the Ruby terminal is a bit wobbly in a few respects still, though I use it more and more. So there are a few non-Ruby bits left. So far.

  • V HOP
    2•9 months ago

    Heh, yeah, that’s part of what’s currently keeping me on X. I use little more than a bunch of shells and Chrome, so there’s not many incentives for me to switch. All of my Ruby X tools are very light on the X11 API use, so they’ll eventually be fairly simple to migrate over, but the window manager vs. compositor situation is frustrating.

    I’m somewhat tempted to hack together some FrankenCompositor based on wlroots that implements the bare minimum of the X11 protocol to allow an X11 window manager to to manage the windows. The X11 protocol itself is simple, and while making every WM run would be a ton of work, if you first have a Wayland compositor making it possible to run simpler WMs wouldn’t actually necessarily be so bad. Not likely to happen anytime soon, though, it’s not exactly necessary and I’m not that much of a masochist :)

    A somewhat more sane variant might be FFI bindings for wlroots so it’s possible to use it to build a compositor, but that too seems an awful lot more work than an X window manager.

    • @Xenanthropy@beehaw.org
      2•9 months ago

      Very true! Well hey those are still some great ideas - would be really nice to see something like that exist for sure. Keep us updated on the project! Always love seeing new ruby stuff