GWM
More info
- Creator
- Colas Nahaboo
- Owner
- Bull
- Released
- Type
- Window manager
The Generic Window Manager, Bull's programmable window manager from 1989, in which frames, menus and behaviour were written in its own Lisp dialect, ten years before Sawfish.
Colas Nahaboo built GWM at Bull's research lab in Sophia-Antipolis and released it in the X11R3 contrib tree in 1989. Where twm had a configuration file, GWM had a language: WOOL, the Window Object Oriented Language, a small Lisp in which every window frame was assembled from objects called bars and plugs and every mouse click was bound to a function. Given the right profile GWM looked like twm, like mwm or like nothing anyone had seen, and it shipped with virtual screens, an icon manager and menus that were all written in WOOL and could be changed without recompiling.
The price was that the user had to like parentheses, and most people settled for twm or bought Motif. Development stopped around 1995. The idea lived on: Sawfish with its Lisp in 1999, StumpWM in Common Lisp, xmonad in Haskell and awesome in Lua all do what GWM did, in languages people can be bothered to learn.