[clfswm-devel] Comparsion of clfswm with other "extensible" WMs

[Philippe Brochard]

Teika Kazura writes:

> Hi, clfswm world.
>
Hi,

> I'm Teika, a former developer of Sawfish, another WM written in
> a lisp dialect. I've come to know clfswm, and added it to the list of
> "Comparison of extensible window manager", 
>   http://sawfish.wikia.com/wiki/Comparison_of_extensible_window_managers
> a page of Sawfish Wiki. Although I had a browse of clfswm docs, some
> blanks remain, and I wonder if you're interested in filling them in.
> Feel free to rewrite; I'm the main contributor to that page, and
> you may feel it's too oriented to Sawfish.
>
First, thanks a lot for your work on Sawfish. I have really liked to use
it! I have yet some references for it on my web page :)

    http://hocwp.free.fr/ah2cl/screen-cmucl.png  (~year 2005)

I'm glad to hear you take care of CLFSWM in your comparison!

Of course, I'll fill this page soon. I have found some useful
information when reading it.

> Some features of clfswm look attractive to me. Parent-children model,
> printed key-binding (so probably not so difficult to use for
> newcomers), etc. And Repl is a must for me. =)
>
Wow, nice. I'm happy to hear you like some part of it.

> I have a question. In Sawfish, users can easily override files
> installed system-wide. For example, /usr/share/sawfish/lisp/foo/bar.jl
> yields to ~/.sawfish/lisp/foo/bar.jl. Is it possible in clfswm?
> (Perhaps not difficult at all for Common lisp.)
>
The proposed way to do what you say with CLFSWM is to rewrite some
functions in your .clfswmrc configuration file. Same name, same
arguments but different body.
If you have many functions to rewrite, you can put the original file
somewhere with write access, change what you want in it and load it from
the configuration file. If you're concerned by speed, you can even
compile it before loading. Something like this:

(load (compile-file "/where/is/your/file/your_file.lisp"))

And a final solution if changes are too important is to fork CLFSWM.

Also, for users who have made lots of changes and want to share them
with others, there is a contrib/ directory in CLFSWM sources done for
this purpose. One can completely change CLFSWM from there. See
contrib/osd.lisp for example.

> Regards,
> Teika (Teika kazura)
>
Best regards,

Philippe