Thursday, June 23, 2022

X11 window manager using the Penrose library written in Rust Language

      Since I began using Linux as my main OS sometime around 1998, I have always enjoyed trying out the many X11 window managers along with hacking on them or creating my own.

     Recently, I discovered on Github an X11 window manager library written in Rust language called Penrose.   Having played around with Rust a few times, I decided to see if using this library would make it easier to create a customized tiling window manager.   I found Penrose to be very well documented and in just a few hours I was able to put together a fully functional tiling window manager that is minimal and stable written in 100% Rust language.

     I named it MPWM for My Penrose Window Manager.  I like the Penrose idea about making a library in a solid system level language that allows others to customize rather than everyone trying to write their own window managers from scratch.  It gives the power of other programming language window managers such as Xmonad or Stumpwm but without having to load the full language into memory like with Haskell or Lisp.

    While MPWM is not perfect, there are still features or changes I may make, it's not about the end results for me as much as the journey.  I enjoy the challenge and making my computer work just the way I want.  The ability to change and modify everything in my OS is what keeps me using Linux to this day.

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