Étoilé
More info
- Creator
- Quentin Mathé, Nicolas Roard
- Released
- Type
- Desktop environment
- Website
- etoileos.com
A desktop project on GNUstep, started in 2004, that wanted to replace applications and files with documents and components, and left behind frameworks rather than a desktop.
Étoilé was founded by Quentin Mathé and Nicolas Roard as an attempt to do something with GNUstep other than imitate NeXT. The vision was a document-centric system in the spirit of OpenDoc and Smalltalk: no applications in the usual sense, but components assembled around whatever the user was working on, with version history on everything. To get there the project built the frameworks itself: CoreObject, a versioned object store, EtoileUI for interfaces assembled from objects, and LanguageKit, which let Smalltalk code be compiled with LLVM and call Objective-C directly. The window manager, Azalea, was Openbox rewritten in Objective-C.
The 0.2 release from 2007 and 0.4 never reached a desktop anyone could use daily, and activity died out in the mid-2010s. What survives is ideas and code inside GNUstep itself. Étoilé is one of those projects where the journey became the destination, which was not what the plan said.