Waimea

Reveman started Waimea in 2001 as a Blackbox-like manager that used what was new in X: text through Xft instead of the server's bitmap fonts, and XRender for menus and frames with an alpha channel. It read Blackbox style files, so there were themes from day one, and grouped windows under a shared title bar the way Fluxbox and pwm did. Configuration was built on action lists: every event, a click on a given part of the frame or a key in a given state, mapped to a chain of actions in a text file, which gave more freedom than most and a learning curve to match.

The project stalled around 2003, when Reveman moved on to glitz, an OpenGL backend for Cairo, and then to Novell, where Xgl and Compiz were the result. Waimea reads as the sketch: the same person who tried to get good-looking rendering out of an ordinary X server decided a few years later to replace the server instead. The manager survives in the odd source package and is remembered by those who ran it as the one that looked best in 2002 and crashed thereafter.