Window Managers, A question

[Gregory Bell <winston@atlantic.net>]

Rick Jones wrote:

> Orn E. Hansen wrote:
> >
> >   I took a look at the latest version of WindowMaker, which is a window manager
> > that emulates the OpenStep window manager.  As far as I can see, and I've been
> > using it heavily for a few days, is that it is quite stable and good looking.
> > It is quite a resource hog, takes 64 colors of the machine, which is quite a
> > lot when you have an 8-bit deep color display.
>
> That is a choice I've been considering.  I haven't checked it out yet,
> I've been working on Enlightenment.
>
> Can you get Enlightenment at www.enlightenment.org and compare it with
> WindowMaker?
>
> I'm leaning toward enlightenment for a few reasons.
>
>         1. Rasterman, author, is now working for Red Hat on the gnome project
> which           is the source of our desktop tools.  I figure that both gnome
> and E are               going to pick things up from the other because of that.
>
>         2. E is more configurable than any of the other WM's out there.  This
> means           that a user is free to create any look and feel he/she wants.
> Since                   "themes" can be changed via a menu selection, a user can go
> from a wild             theme to a Mac theme to a Win95 theme to an Amiga theme
> without changing                config files, as long as he/she actually has the
> theme.
>
>         3. E has a tcl configurator called Econfig that configures/builds
> themes          from within the GUI.
>
>         4. E is a bit of a resource hog as well, not as bad as it was, but
> considering the other pro's to it, weighed against AS and WM which are
> just            as bad if not worse, I think it may turn out to be the overall
> best choice.            The *only* other choice, as far as I'm concerned would
> be FVWM, and I would            not be happy having that represent SEUL/Linux to
> prospective converts.  It's             just too damned fake looking.  It tends to
> look like something out of a kids               coloring book.
>
> Let me know what your comparison turns out like.  Also give me an idea
> of what kind of system you're using.  Take a look at the themes page for
> screen shots of some of the different themes.  Gives you an idea of the
> versatility in the program.  Instead of adding a new window manager you
> add a theme that looks and feels like it for a fraction of the hard
> drive space.

  I only have one question for you, do not both enlightenment and Windowmanager require

that all apps that are on the desktop be recompiled using GTK??  If this is the case
then
it seems to me that both are relatively useless for Seul because other than some basic
apps there are not many apps that have been converted.

An example, I use pine as a mail reader.  Can I install either of the above WM's and
get pine to run??

    Greg