Heh, yeah, that’s part of what’s currently keeping me on X. I use little more than a bunch of shells and Chrome, so there’s not many incentives for me to switch. All of my Ruby X tools are very light on the X11 API use, so they’ll eventually be fairly simple to migrate over, but the window manager vs. compositor situation is frustrating.

I’m somewhat tempted to hack together some FrankenCompositor based on wlroots that implements the bare minimum of the X11 protocol to allow an X11 window manager to to manage the windows. The X11 protocol itself is simple, and while making every WM run would be a ton of work, if you first have a Wayland compositor making it possible to run simpler WMs wouldn’t actually necessarily be so bad. Not likely to happen anytime soon, though, it’s not exactly necessary and I’m not that much of a masochist :)

A somewhat more sane variant might be FFI bindings for wlroots so it’s possible to use it to build a compositor, but that too seems an awful lot more work than an X window manager.

That’s an interesting one I’d missed. Thanks :)

It might just tempt me to ditch bspwm, or at least experiment. I use little enough of bspwm capabilities, so it might be feasible. I have also lightly toyed with the idea of writing my own, as since I don’t use menu bars etc. even on my floating screen (the “menu bars” in my desktop manager are just client rendered titles) I really need very few capabilities. Basically pretty much just a placement function similar-ish to bspwm, and the ability to move and resize and float windows.

On the other hand, a truly minimalist WM is <100 lines, so I might consider writing one from scratch too (I’d need to update the Ruby X11 binding to handle StructureNotify events and add a few more calls, but that’s pretty trivial). Though at this point we’re quickly approaching zealotry :) It would be fun, though. Maybe when I’m done replacing the terminal fully…

Not everything is on Github yet, and much of it is messy and with dependencies on my environment (in the process of cleaning that up), but if you click through the “cross-posted to:” link there are a bunch of links to repo’s of what I have pushed so far.

Thanks. I’m in no rush, but yeah, it’s all very small. They depend pretty much on a handful of X calls at the moment, and aiming to isolate that in a couple of very small classes, so should be very simple. Hoping to clean it up and push more of these to github soon.

This is basically the concept of a Webring, and used to be big. Some were fixed (as in the path through the ring was always the same), but some were more flexible or random or semi-random.

A decentralised approach would be new, and not necessarily too hard since the dataset for each ring would be small, so each member could just store all or a subset of the entries in their ring and submit updates to their “neighbours” in the ring that’d eventually spread out to everyone. The challenge is moderation - you’ll still end up with some entities that have a privileged position to weed out bad entries, because the appeal was always to a large extent to make discovery “someone else’s problem” and the moment you let someone put links on your site someone will try to abuse it.