piewm

Don Hopkins had built pie menus in NeWS and shown at CHI 1988 that they were faster than list menus. Getting them onto the X desktop required a window manager, and the easiest route was to take one that already existed: tvtwm, twm with a virtual desktop. piewm is that code with one more thing in the configuration file, a piemenu block that works like twm's menu but draws the entries in a ring around the pointer instead of in a list below it. The root menu and the window menus could all become circles, and after a week the directions were in your hand and the menu hardly needed drawing at all.

It never got big, the twm family was already on its way out when fvwm arrived, but piewm was the first place an ordinary Unix user could try the idea without sitting at a Sun running NeWS, and the code circulated freely as source. Hopkins carried pie menus on to the SimCity port in HyperLook and to The Sims. piewm stayed a footnote, one of the few window managers that tried to replace a convention rather than just the look.