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wmii-1 released

Lang hab’ ich darauf gewartet, jetzt ist es da: Das erste offizielle Release des Windowmanagers wmii. Uriel, wie das Wunderwerk heißt, kommt mit einigen wirklich coolen Features daher. (Announcement)

wmii introduces many new features not seen in a window manager before. Most important ones are the new socket-based filesystem approach to customize and interoperate with wmii and the new layout mechanism, which provides a new window management approach. Apart from these approaches wmii is highly modularized and consists of several binaries, see wmii(1), wmibar(1), wmifs(1), wmiinput(1), wmikeys(1), wmiplumb(1), wmir(1), and wmiwarp(1) for details.

wmii is designed to support different rendering backend mechanisms. Until now we have an unrecommended cairo (http://www.cairographics.org) rendering backend and the default xlib backend. The cairo backend is not recommended in production use, because the cairo library is still very buggy and crashes wmii very often (caused by nasty bugs within the library itself). I don’t expect that the quality of the cairo library will increase in the near future, thus a xft backend is planned as workaround for wmii-2.

A nice side effect of the decision to implement wmii in C resulted in a smaller code base and much smaller binaries compared to wmi.