1 This is David Hogan's 9wm updated to behave more like
2 Plan 9's rio. Since I cannot get approval for the changes
3 and I'd prefer not to resort to patches, I have renamed it "rio".
5 Current incompatibilities that would be nice to fix:
7 - The command-line options should be made more like Plan 9.
9 - Should work out a protocol between 9term and rio so that:
10 * 9term can tell rio to blue its border during hold mode
12 - Should change window focus on b2/b3 clicks and then
13 pass along the click event to the now-focused window.
15 - Should change 9term to redirect b3 clicks to rio so that rio
16 can put up the usual b3 menu.
18 Axel Belinfante contributed the code to handle border grabbing
19 for resize and various other improvements.
21 The original README is below.
29 Copyright 1994-1996 David Hogan.
34 9wm is an X window manager which attempts to emulate the Plan 9 window
35 manager 8-1/2 as far as possible within the constraints imposed by X.
36 It provides a simple yet comfortable user interface, without garish
37 decorations or title-bars. Or icons. And it's click-to-type. This
38 will not appeal to everybody, but if you're not put off yet then read
39 on. (And don't knock it until you've tried it.)
41 One major difference between 9wm and 8-1/2 is that the latter provides
42 windows of text with a typescript interface, and doesn't need to run a
43 separate program to emulate a terminal. 9wm, as an X window manager,
44 does require a separate program. For better 8-1/2 emulation, you should
45 obtain Matthew Farrow's "9term" program (ftp://ftp.cs.su.oz.au/matty/unicode),
46 version 1.6 or later (earlier versions don't cooperate with 9wm in
47 implementing "hold mode"). Of course, you can run xterm under 9wm as well.
52 9wm is not a virtual window manager. It is not customisable to any
53 great extent. It is not large and unwieldy, and doesn't use the X
54 toolkit. Requests to make it any of these things will be silently
55 ignored (or flamed if I have had a bad day :-) If you want tvtwm
56 or mwm, you know where to get them...
61 The latest version of 9wm is held at ftp://ftp.cs.su.oz.au/dhog/9wm
66 9wm was written by David Hogan (dhog@cs.su.oz.au), a postgraduate
67 student at the Basser Department of Computer Science, University
68 of Sydney (http://www.cs.su.oz.au/~dhog/).
73 9wm is free software, and is Copyright (c) 1994-1996 by David Hogan.
74 Permission is granted to all sentient beings to use this software,
75 to make copies of it, and to distribute those copies, provided
78 (1) the copyright and licence notices are left intact
79 (2) the recipients are aware that it is free software
80 (3) any unapproved changes in functionality are either
81 (i) only distributed as patches
82 or (ii) distributed as a new program which is not called 9wm
83 and whose documentation gives credit where it is due
84 (4) the author is not held responsible for any defects
85 or shortcomings in the software, or damages caused by it.
87 There is no warranty for this software. Have a nice day.
89 How do I compile/install it?
90 ============================
92 Assuming your system is correctly configured, you should only need to
93 run xmkmf to generate the Makefile, and then run make or make install.
94 make install.man should copy the manpage (9wm.man) to the appropriate
97 If the make fails, complaining that the function _XShapeQueryExtension
98 does not exist, try removing the "-DSHAPE" from the Imakefile, and
99 run xmkmf and make again.
101 If you don't have imake, or it is misconfigured, or you would prefer
102 not to use it, try copying the file "Makefile.no-imake" to "Makefile",
103 then edit the definitions in this Makefile to suit your system. This
104 may require defining suitable compilation flags for your system
105 (normally imake does this for you). For instance, on AIX you must
106 include "-DBSD_INCLUDES" in CFLAGS.
111 See the manual page for details. You should probably read the
112 man page for 9term as well.
114 What if I find a bug?
115 =====================
117 Please mail all bug reports to 9wm-bugs@plan9.cs.su.oz.au, so
118 that I can incorporate fixes into the next release. If you can
119 tell me how to fix it, all the better.
124 9wm tries hard to emulate 8-1/2, but isn't 100% compatible. If
125 you are an experienced 8-1/2 user, please be patient with it.
127 One intentional difference between 9wm and 8-1/2 is in the behaviour
128 of the menu when the last hidden item is unhidden. Under 8-1/2, when
129 the menu is next used, it pops up with "New" selected. Under 9wm,
130 the (new) last menu item will be selected. This is a feature. It
131 may be confusing if you frequently switch between 9wm and 8-1/2.
132 If you don't like this feature, email me for the one line fix.
134 There have been some problems encountered when resizing 9term on
135 some platforms. This turns out to be a problem in 9term (actually
136 in libXg, to be precise). Newer versions of 9term should be
137 immune to this, see matty@cs.su.oz.au if your 9term needs fixing.
139 Some client programs do weird things. One of these is Frame Maker.
140 It appears that if it has a modal dialog on the screen, then if any
141 of its windows are current, all keypresses are redirected to the
142 modal dialog. This is not 9wm's fault -- Frame Maker is doing this.
144 Programs like Netscape Navigator like to put riddiculously long
145 icon name properties on their windows, of the form "Netscape: blah blah".
146 There is no way that I know of to stop netscape from doing this. For this
147 reason, 9wm truncates labels at the first colon it finds. This keeps the
148 button 3 menu from becoming excessively wide. Note that with same
149 applications, you can use an iconName resource to set the label; this
150 works well for "xman", whose default icon name of "Manual Browser"
156 http://www.cs.su.oz.au/~dhog/
159 ftp://ftp.cs.su.oz.au/matty/unicode/
160 for source to 9term (get README first)
162 ftp://plan9.att.com/plan9/unixsrc/sam/
163 for source && info on Rob Pike's editor "sam"
165 ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/unix-faq/shell/rc
166 for information on a publically available implementation
167 of the Plan 9 shell "rc" for unix (or look in comp.unix.shell).
169 ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/rc
170 for source to the abovementioned implementation of rc.
172 http://plan9.att.com/plan9/
173 http://plan9.att.com/magic/man2html/1/8%c2%bd
174 for information on Plan 9 (including the 8-1/2 manual entry)
179 Thanks to Rob Pike for writing the original 8-1/2 program (and
180 before that, mux) which inspired the writing of 9wm.
182 Thanks to John Mackin, whose gwm "wool code" for emulating mux
183 was also an inspiration: I used it (and hacked it) until I got
184 too frustrated with gwm's large memory requirements and lack of
185 speed (sorry Colas!), and decided to write a dedicated program.
187 Thanks to Matthew Farrow for writing 9term.
189 A big thanks to Dave Edmondson for adding support for
190 multi-screen displays.
192 The following people helped beta test 9wm:
