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Azalea

Posted on 15 February 2006 by Yen-Ju Chen

Azalea is derived from WMaker released by Enrico Sersale, which is based on WindowMaker 0.92. The goal is to replace WINGs with GNUstep while keeping it work as WindowMaker. It is still experimental and may not work out in the end.

I put Azalea in SVN in hope people can help here and there. It is in Etoile/Service/Private/. You can run 'configure' before 'make', but 'make' should work. It depends on libwraster, but not WINGs. Some parts of WINGs are in the source code already. It should works as WindowMaker. No major function is broken. If you found one, it is a bug to be fixed.

Besides the TODO in README, here is the list of tasks in my mind:

  1. Switch Panel (switchpanel.m):

    This is only called from cycling.m and is an eye-candy. Therefore, it should be easy to work on. Probably a NSPanel will do. But you might need to deal with both Xwindow and NSApplication event. It is triggered by key press through Xwindow, then once the switch panel (NSPanel) shows up, it is handled by NSApplication. Currently it does not work because the pixmap files are missing. But the Alt-Tab still work to switch focus among windows.

  2. Contextual menu:

    The main menu is a NSMenu already (right-click on the empty space). There are still four menus needed to be rewritten: dock menu (icon) on the right), application icon and miniwindow menu (icon on the bottom), clip menu (icon on the top-left corner), window menu (right-click on the window title or Ctrl+ESC). Some menu will call a dialog for settings (icon chooser is rewritten already). It can be rewritten as NSPanel later. You can check the OpenRootMenu() in rootmenu.m for main menu. It should be better to replace these menus with contextual menu from GNUstep.

  3. Array and dictionary:

    WINGs has its own WMArray and WMHashTable. It may be nice to replace them with NSArray and NSDictionary, or NSMapTable and NSHashTable. But it is used everywhere, and may not be worth to rewrite at this stage.

  4. Notification:

    Same as above.

  5. Dialog:

    Beside the dialog called from menus mentioned above, there are still two dialogs: message and crash dialog. I already partially rewrite the message dialog. But here is the trick: the dialogs may be called outside NSApplication run loop, especially when Azalea starts up and crash. Therefore, it may not be safe to use NSPanel for these situation.

  6. Property list:

    Most of the property list are already rewritten. The rest is in winspector, which will be replaced by WMWindowInspector. It is work-in-progress. Once it is done, we should be able to remove property list from WINGs.

  7. General clean-up:

    There are some general functions here and there, which can be easily rewritten in ObjC. They can probably be collected into a WMUtilities class.

  8. Localization:

    Replace all @"..." with _(@"...") should be fine.

  9. Remove most of WINGs:

    Some parts of WINGs may not be able to replaced easily, but others should be clean up.