

Unix Desktop Environment
ude
the ultimate desktop experience

Some kind of a preview - or more a dream?

by Jan Rocho and Christian Ruppert

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1 Motivation - Yet another Window Manager?

Right - there is quite a wide variety of window managers for X11-Unix
machines, among them very good ones like fvwm and very comfortable
and beautiful ones like kwm/kde. So why the f**k another WM? Well,
we got our reasons (which hopefully soon will also be yours):

* First of all both of us didn't like the 'conventional way of window
  managing' very much: For example to close a window which is completely
  covered with other windows at the moment you first have to click
  and drag away anything else just to reach the close button. Same
  thing if you are having a docu window in the background behind your
  active editor window ant the syntax you need is just covered by
  the sothern border of your editor. Wouldn't it be nice to be able
  to do any window action from any position - it would and now even
  is.

* Then we were not very pleased with WM-features or concepts like the
  KDE-filemanager that don't do anything but slowing down the system.

* We wanted a good and powerful filemanager which can almost be a shell
  substitute (of course a file manager will never achieve this completely,
  but e.g. TkDesk shows the right way) integrated into the WM without
  being an unremoveable part of it.

* Another point is that most window managers are quite hard to configure.
  uwm won't.

Finally you should notice that this project was not started to dismiss
or imitate KDE. We both appreciate what all the people are doing,
not only for a group of freaks but also for the whole idea of Linux
as well as the (very big and thank god in the moment very fast growing)
group of Linux beginners and people who changed from Windows. Probably
without KDE this project would not exist at all and I am planning
to keep up a certain compatibility between KDE and ude. For example
will it be possible to run all KDE applications under (later versions
of) ude. Of course for example the colour configuration etc. will
also be supported. We just didn't like some features of KDE, and we
want to create a window manager which is not so much conventional
but productive. In my opinion uwm will not be so much a window manager
for people used to and liking the 'Windows' look and feel but more
for everybody who doesn't like this very much.

ude - get used to it...

2 uwm and ugs - the basic elements of ude

2.1 uwm - the window manager

ude's window manager will be called uwm, the ultimate window manager.
It will break with most common look and feels and is palled to be
at least as configurable as kde or windows. Of course, if we find
some good designers, we will a.so try to make it as colourful and
pretty as the two of them but top priority is a usable and practical
high performance window manager with the following characteristics:

* No title bars: uwm windows do not have a title bar with icons etc.
  the title will be displayed on a configurable place, but window
  action can not be taken by clicking on small icons on the title
  bar but rather by clicking somewhere on the border with the right
  button(s).

* Configurable control bar: uwm will have an easily configurable control
  bar which will be integrated into the window manager itself due
  to performance reasons

* High performance: uwm will not use anything like qt or other libraries
  that are slowing it down just to make it beautiful. There will also
  be no filemanager having to run all the time in background to make
  the control bar and the menus work.

2.2 ugs - the 'graphical shell' of ude

I just called the ude file manager ugs - the ultimate graphical shell
but the implementation of this part has not started yet (hohoho, programmers!),
and here are some Ideas I have considering this which should explain
the name graphical shell:

* ugs should support a large variety of file types recognised and be
  able to call user defined programs clicking on the files.

* ugs should have some kind of a terminal as input/output window (like
  a shell).

* ugs should be able to communicate with the uwm about running processes
  in order to kill hung ones and other actions.

* ugs should not have to be running all the time.

* ugs should be able to create and extract archive files.

* in general: ugs should be quite like TkDesk, Probably there's someone
  out there who likes to modify it to our needs.

* perhaps (since the internet is becomeing more and more popular and
  important) parts of Netscape could be integrated somehow (as a loadable
  module or something)
