Sawfish
More info
- Creator
- John Harper
- Released
- 1999
- Type
- Window manager
- Successor
- Metacity (in GNOME)
A window manager that was really a Lisp program with window management as a side effect, and GNOME's default around the turn of the millennium.
John Harper wrote it in 1999 under the name Sawmill, which had to go when it turned out to belong to another product. Almost everything beyond the core was written in librep, its own Lisp dialect in the Emacs tradition. Users could rewrite its behaviour while it was running, and many did.
Sawfish succeeded Enlightenment as GNOME's window manager and was the default in GNOME 2.0. From GNOME 2.2 Metacity took over, on the theory that fewer settings meant fewer bugs. Sawfish carried on as an enthusiasts' project, which is a polite way of describing people who read their window manager's source.