#macOS #wayland #xquartz #river #wm

For my sins, I sometimes have to use a MacBook, and for X11, Xquartz has been a god-sent as it allows me to run an X11 WM and have it appear on MacOS.

But there isn't an equivalent of that for wayland. So I've started to write one. Only this one is based on River's protocols. You can see a screenshot of it attached.

What this means is that any WM which uses #river as its compositor should work with this, assuming it can be ported to #macOS

Specifically I'm referring to the ability if having the wayland compositor render its windows as the WM intended.

It's still a WIP, but things look promising thus far. The core of it is writen in Rust, which is a language I've been wanting to try. The Apple-specific "shim" which allows windows to appear non-natively is written in Objective-C.

I suck at both languages, so I suspect many errors, but so far, I'm liking the progress I'm making...

I'll try and get this code published over the weekend, or early next week.

I've been chipping away at this for many months, so it'll be incomplete. But I do have some XWayland support already working, hence the #xterm screenshot.

#xteddy #motif

Many years ago, when I was much younger, incredibly more naive (that hasn't improved with age!), I worked on the Linux Gazette in my spare time. This was predominately when I was at University...

Heather Stern created a #motif version of xteddy (https://itn-web.it.liu.se/~stegu76/xteddy/xteddy_info.html) for me.

He's attached in this post.

I plan on adding this to #wteddy (https://codeberg.org/thomasadam/wteddy)

What a brilliant idea Heather had. Thanks to her! :)

Viva #motif!

#cow #fvwm #wayland

Improving the default out-of-the-box experience.

I wonder if anyone would be interested in helping me with improving CoW when it has no user config available?

For the past week I've been working on this, to do things such as:

* Add a welcome screen in CoW explaining what is possible.
* Add a "default" cowbuttons instance showing useful things.

If you're interested in helping improve this, have a look at the `ta/starter-desktop` branch in cow:

https://codeberg.org/cow-wm/cow/src/branch/ta/starter-desktop

If you already have a config file in ~/.config/cow/ -- I would suggest starting cow as:

river -c 'cow -c /dev/null'

I'd be interested in what you think!

Oh, part of this work (and this week for that matter) is I finally wrote a xdc-menu aware generator for wayland applications (looking at .desktop files) which forms a big part of this default-starter idea.

I will eventually spin this command as a standalone application, but for now it's a part of CoW.

I'm not good at all with themes/styles (as you can tell from all my other screenshots). So what I've come up with is functional, but isn't necessarily pretty.

If you're interested in helping, come and see us in `#cow-wayland` on irc.libera.chat

What is cow? It's a stacking window manager using River as the compositor:

https://codeberg.org/cow-wm/cow

#art #paintings

My wife and.I bought a new painting.

It's a wildlife scenery depicting the Uffington white horse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uffington_White_Horse) with local wildlife: hare, hedgehog, mouse, barn owl, fox.

You can see sunflowers, foxgloves, etc.

It's just a nice, colourful painting, by a local artist.

I bet being an artist is hard work and not a lot of money happens because of it.

We bought the original painting of this, rather than a print.

Worth every penny.

And the wife is happy. ;)

#got #gameoftrees #vcs

Hello everyone,

I've released the -portable version of got-0.130, in-line with upstream got.

See their changelog for what's included:

https://gameoftrees.org/releases/changes.html#2026-10-14

For portable-specific information, see:

https://gameoftrees.org/portable.html

Any questions, shout!

#cow #wayland

I had this idea for a while to create some sort of container configuration editor for CoW such that you could define a layout visually, and have that something represented in CoW.

Well, now I sort of do. See screenshot attached.

It's written in #tcl #tk for quick prototyping, and works through CoW's existing IPC mechanism. Hence. this editor can export the relevant config for use elsewhere.

I'm still working on it, but it's a lot of fun...

#cow #cde #wayland

I've been making steady improvements to cowbuttons and have come up with a fairly accurate approximation of CDE's panel.

See screenshot attached.

What is CoW? It's a window manager for wayland using River as the compositor.

https://codeberg.org/cow-wm/cow

#wayland #menus

Hey all,

Does anyone know if there's anything similar to xdg-menu [0] for Wayland?

I know most compositors have some sort of menu -- how are they typically handling entries in menus?

I suspect it's compositor-specific, but I'm curious in case that's not the case.

I'm asking because #CoW could benefit from that.

[0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xdg-menu

#x11 #x11cp #monitoring

Hey everyone,

I'm going to be adding some more programs to the x11cp project over the weekend, but thought I'd test them first:

* xmemuse (memory monitoring)
* xmm (memory monitoring)
* xsysinfo (CPU/memory monitoring)
* xloadtime (xload + patches)
* Procmeter (CPU/memory)

They're all a lot of fun. I love applications like these. :)

See screenshot attached.

I'll provide more details on each once they're added to x11cp.

#ctwm #fvwm #x11

For years, people have said #fvwm is ugly.

Well, I'm running ctwm so I can debug #river on NetBSD, and, well...

See image attached.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. :)

Side-note: I really like ctwm, it's fascinating how close (and yet different) it is to #fvwm.

#cow #wayland #shod

I've merged window containers for CoW.

See screenshot attached.

Thanks to @seninha for me blatantly stealing the idea from shod, and implementing it in CoW.

It gives the right balance between tiling and stacking, all in one. Those who want a complete tiling window can go and use sway.

The default bindings for this are in place already -- to play about with it, open two windows, and press:

logo (windows) key, alt, and hold down mouse button 1 -- when you start dragging, the pointer should turn orange. As you move over the target window, you'll see the window indicate where/how the source window will appear in the target window. It might take some getting used to.

I'll try and get a video out tomorrow about this, so there's something more visual.

Also, cow(1) has a lot of information about the various window-container commands for those who want something manual. See the WINDOW CONTAINERS section.

This has been a joy to work on, and very challenging. I'm expecting issues...

Any questions, or bug reports, please join me in `#cow-wayland` on `irc.libera.chat`.

#cow #fvwm #wayland

I've merged a potentially breaking change to main.

This commit separates out the default config into its own system-wide config file which is applied BEFORE anything in ~/.config/cow/cow.conf

Therefore you can think of ~/.config/cow/cow.conf as an overlay on top of that file.

To see the defaults, you can run:

moocow show config -D -f config | less

I'm hopeful this shouldn't interfere too much with existing cow.conf files in use.

Let me know of any difficulties.

#netbsd #ai — I can’t recall whom but I’m sure I’d read recently that NetBSD allowed AI code. This fits against all the literature I’ve read.

Could someone confirm either way?

#boxybsd #vps #bsd

Somewhat late to the party, I've learned that boxybsd is no longer in operation.

I'm really sad to learn of this.

A few years ago, it was invaluable to me in keeping #gameoftrees portable as it allowed me access to a wealth of machines.

Does anyone know why boxybsd has ceased, and are there plans for a successor at all?

Cc: @stefano -- can you shed light on this?

#motif #x11 #cobol

I wonder if we'll ever reach a point where -- much like all the COBOL programmers from the mid-90s -- were recalled back from retirement to fix all the banking applications before the Y2k bug caused mayhem -- if all the old Motif/X11 programmers will be recalled to help keep them running for some $RANDOM_COMPANY because all the #wayland ""developers"" have forgotten how Xwayland works?

#cow #fvwm #wayland

Container Windows?

I've working on a proof-of-concept for a top-level container window which is able to contain other windows in a grid/column fashion.

I've completely and unashamedly (imitation is the highest form of flattery, apparently) stolen the idea of this from shod:

https://seninha.org/projects/shod.html

But I do like the concept a lot.

You can see how this might work from the screenshot below.

I'm still toying around with the idea of this, and I've been working on this since Tuesday this week, in the evenings. I'm hoping to have this mostly done by Sunday, other activities notwithstanding.

Maybe CoW now needs to be renamed to: Container On Wayland? Heh!

Interesting idea, eh? ;)

In the screenshot, you're looking at a container window also with a tabbed window, so they're still supported as-is in CoW, for those who use tabbed windows already.

Cc: @seninha

#got #gameoftrees #vcs

Hello,

I've released got-portable version 0.129

There's nothing -portable-specific in this release, so please refer to GoT's release notes here:

https://gameoftrees.org/releases/changes.html#2026-09-26

For -portable information, see:

https://gameoftrees.org/portable.html

Any questions, do please let me know.

#opentmux #tmux

Hey all -- for those of you interested on #opentmux I'd like your opinion. What do I do with this codebase? I don't sent to chase feature-parity with tmux -- but at the same time, there could be a perceived stagnation if I do nothing.

I've asked the same question on the #opentmux IRC channel on irc.libera.chat

But do please let me know what you'd like me to work on next. One person has suggested "stability" -- anything else?

Let me know.

#motif #x11 #xlib

So, for a while now I've been working in creating a web site for a more maintained set of information for #motif programming, xlib programming, etc.

See: https://motif-central.org

It's perhaps a work in progress still, but the idea is to pull together all of the tidbits of information that's been floating about recently.

If anyone has any desire to help, the repo for this is here:

https://codeberg.org/thomasadam/motif-central

Deployment happens via Codeberg actions, once code has been pushed on the `main` branch.

I hope someone finds it useful or at least interesting.

Thanks to: @gemelen, @jns, @techokami, and no doubt others I've forgotten!

#omarchy #wealth

I wouldn't usually get political here, but I think it's sickening how a madman has garnered millions of pounds when there's plenty of other institutional open source projects which we rely on every day who''ll never get to this level of monetary support.

I do try in my own way to support the projects I love where I can -- #freebsd, #openbsd, #gameoftrees, etc., all of which I've put some level of money behind.

Don't neglect the power of this -- and don't listen to the hype around some fascist's projects building up millions of pounds.

Your individual support means more than you could know.

I absolutely love #gameoftrees, for example, and I know my paid for VM goes a long way to supporting that project. See? You can make a difference and not even realise it. :)