NWM: An X11 Window Manager Written In Node.js

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NWM: An X11 Window Manager Written In Node.js

In case you ever wanted to have a Node.js window manager, there's now one that works for X11 environments that works on Chrome OS, Debian, and friends...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NWM-Node-JS-X11-WM

[SpyroRyder]

So i get that the achievement here ismaking a window manager in a pretty bad high level language but why go for X11 where there are huge ammounts of similar window managers that do the exact same with better performance. why not try to push the envelope a little and make a wayland window manager where there is very little competition.

[TheOne]

So i get that the achievement here ismaking a window manager in a pretty bad high level language but why go for X11 where there are huge ammounts of similar window managers that do the exact same with better performance. why not try to push the envelope a little and make a wayland window manager where there is very little competition.

Maybe because all these hipsters want is to push JavaScript for everything and X11 has good drivers support, wayland doesn't runs on nvidia propietary drivers yet.

[garegin]

Out of curiosity, why are web devs more prone to being hipsters than regular devs?

[boxie]

Out of curiosity, why are web devs more prone to being hipsters than regular devs?

Because all you need to do to be a "web dev" is do a couple of tutorials on the Internet while you are growing your hipster beard*

_{* i may not entirely know what I am talking about, as I took my tutorials and grew my beard well before hipsters became a thing **
** oh shit, I was a hipster before hipsters were hipsters... shit fuck dammit}

[boxie]

Also, they were so wound up wondering if they could, they didn't stop to ask if they should!

[Delgarde]

So i get that the achievement here ismaking a window manager in a pretty bad high level language but why go for X11 where there are huge ammounts of similar window managers that do the exact same with better performance. why not try to push the envelope a little and make a wayland window manager where there is very little competition.

Fun. It's almost certainly that simple... someone wanted to know if it was possible to write an X11 window manager in Node, so they gave it a try.

That said, the git repo contains about 1500 lines of C, so obviously they've found that it's not possible to do it without some natively-compiled code. But that code looks to be just bindings to X11 libraries - all the logic is in the Javascript - so they've somewhat succeeded.

[ssokolow]

so obviously they've found that it's not possible to do it without some natively-compiled code

There exists at least one WM built on xlib-python, which is a pure Python reimplementation of the X11 client libraries, so it IS possible... it's just more work. (And they may not have realized they could just speak raw X11 wire protocol to the X server)

[Delgarde]

There exists at least one WM built on xlib-python, which is a pure Python reimplementation of the X11 client libraries, so it IS possible... it's just more work. (And they may not have realized they could just speak raw X11 wire protocol to the X server)

True. Manually re-implementing the X protocol themselves is probably too much like hard work, but they could probably use the XCB specs to generate javascript bindings.

[roboman2444]

Fun. It's almost certainly that simple... someone wanted to know if it was possible to write an X11 window manager in Node, so they gave it a try.

That said, the git repo contains about 1500 lines of C, so obviously they've found that it's not possible to do it without some natively-compiled code. But that code looks to be just bindings to X11 libraries - all the logic is in the Javascript - so they've somewhat succeeded.

From my limited knowledge of window managers from messing with DWM, the logic isn't actually that complex, especially for a tiling WM. Javascript probably makes it really really easy to deal with that sort of stuff also, because managing content on a very dynamic webpage will have similar logic to managing windows on a screen.

Kinda dissapointed that they needed 1500 lines of C just for X11 bindings. DWM is only 2000 lines of C, and that handles everything WM related. Either making C to node.js bindings takes a lot of code, or they are using way more X11 features than they need to be.