Sawfish (formerly known as Sawmill) is an extensible window manager using an Emacs Lisp-like scripting language called Librep. All window decorations are configurable, the basic idea is to have as much user-interface policy as possible controlled through the Lisp language.
Despite this extensibility its policy is currently very minimal compared to most window managers. Its aim is simply to manage windows in the most flexible and attractive manner possible. Consequently, it does not implement desktop backgrounds, applications docks, or other functionality that may be achieved through separate applications.
All high-level window manager functions are implemented in Lisp for future extensibility or redefinition. Currently this includes menus (using GTK+), interactive window moving and resizing, virtual workspaces, iconification, focus/transient window policies, frame theme definitions and much more.
Most received events are exported to the Lisp environment through ‘key-bindings’ and hooks, similar to in Emacs. These events include pointer behaviour and many internal X11 events (enter/leave, focus-in/focus-out, map/unmap, etc..)
Sawfish was used with the GNOME desktop environment until it was replaced by Metacity in GNOME 2.2 because of issues including accessibility, maintainability of the code, and multi-head support.
Features include:
- Highly configurable.
- Powerful key-binding: Functionality can be bound to keys or mouse buttons.
- Event hooking: Customize how Sawfish responds to events such as moving windows.
- Window matching: Match windows to a set of rules and automatically perform actions on them.
- Flexible theming: Permits themes to be created and a variety of third-party themes are readily available.
- All high-level wm functions are implemented in Lisp for future extensibility or redefinition.
Website: sawfish.wikia.com
Support: Documentation
Developer: John Harper, Sawfish community
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Sawfish is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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