Wio: Plan 9's Rio Windowing System Re-Implemented As A Wayland Compositor

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wio: Plan 9's Rio Windowing System Re-Implemented As A Wayland Compositor

Wio is the newest Wayland compositor out there and re-implements Rio, the windowing system used by Bell Labs' Plan 9 operating system...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wio-Wayland-Compositor

[StarterX4]

A stupid question: Why everyone develops only i3-like WMs for Wayland? Why still there's no any OpenBox/Fluxbox/PekWM-like WM? :v

[Slithery]

Ooooh, shiny and old-skool. That's just up my street!!!

Can't wait to try it out. Hopefully there'll be a package landing in 3...2...1...

[kpedersen]

This is cool. One thing that is lacking from rio from plan9port is that applications take over the executing terminal. This is finally a gimmick of Wayland that is remotely nice

A stupid question: Why everyone develops only i3-like WMs for Wayland? Why still there's no any OpenBox/Fluxbox/PekWM-like WM? :v

Plan 9's Rio is not a tiling WM like i3. It looks minimal but acts a little bit more similar to OpenBox.

Plus the fact that 99% of themes for OpenBox only look good with a 1 pixel thin border (making it almost impossible to grab / resize without the alt key), makes Wio actually a more user friendly OpenBox than OpenBox

[ezst036]

I'd like to see a revival of fsn.

"It's a Wayland system! I know this!"

[uid313]

This is really cool, that an application can take over a window. But what is the overhead of running each application in its own nested Wayland compositor?

Also, launching an application by creating a new window by drawing the window size with the mouse on the screen is not how I would like to work. That is not good window management. That is not intuitive. That is not good usability.

[Guest]

A stupid question: Why everyone develops only i3-like WMs for Wayland? Why still there's no any OpenBox/Fluxbox/PekWM-like WM? :v

Good question. Where are dwm-inspired WMs?

[tildearrow]

Ooooh, shiny and old-skool. That's just up my street!!!

Can't wait to try it out. Hopefully there'll be a package landing in 3...2...1...

0! There is an AUR package called "wio- Oh wait, that's a different thing...

[c117152]

This is really cool, that an application can take over a window. But what is the overhead of running each application in its own nested Wayland compositor?

Since each window in wayland already allocates its own buffer, I'm guessing it's about the same as usual.

Also, launching an application by creating a new window by drawing the window size with the mouse on the screen is not how I would like to work. That is not good window management. That is not intuitive. That is not good usability.

You're not wrong. Though Sam - a win3.1 style text editor - was (is?) still being used by a couple of the old timers, most of plan9's development was done using Acme which is a tiling text editor that leveraged this in-frame functionality to run the terminal and image / pdf viewers internally. Actually I think it run everything internally but I can't remember every trying to run the web browsers in it too.

More so was the fact Rio had everything exposed on the file-system so people run scripts effectively converting it into a tiling windows manager on login.

Anyhow, plan9port still has both and there are third parties maintaining and packaging different versions of Acme and Sam if you're curious. And if you're feeling particularly adventures there's 9front...

Either way, I think it would be nice to see this functionality ported into Sway even if it's limited to a few supporting applications and what not. Maybe the suckless guys will help since they were working towards something similar a few years ago. And of course, emacs already has all that one way or another...

[Hugh]

Sam - a win3.1 style text editor - was (is?) still being used by a couple of the old timers

What do you mean by "win3.1 style text editor"?

Rob Pike worked on the University of Toronto's version of UNIX ed and the qed editor before creating sam. I assume that those informed his design of sam.