Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!crdgw1!montnaro From: montnaro@spyder.crd.ge.com (Skip Montanaro) Newsgroups: comp.windows.news Subject: Re: how are other sites using XNeWS? Message-ID: Date: 15 Feb 90 18:22:47 GMT References: Sender: news@crdgw1.crd.ge.com Reply-To: montanaro@crdgw1.ge.com (Skip Montanaro) Organization: GE Corporate Research & Development, Schenectady, NY Lines: 53 In-reply-to: hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu's message of 15 Feb 90 08:32:15 GMT Charles Hedrick writes concerning XNeWS problems. I have a couple of comments on the XNeWS situation. The olwm/pswm interface appears (unfortunately) to be stable as far as Sun is concerned. During XNeWS beta testing I complained about the lack of function key support, but was told it was an OpenLook design issue. (NeWS1.1 supported function keys, and you could do it in PostScript if you like.) Sun likes to tout how OpenLook is standard, and was designed by human factors types. As far as I'm concerned, nobody has had enough experience with good user interfaces to sit down and write a (horribly large, hard-to-read) spec from which a window manager with a "good" look-and-feel will be created. I'm convinced you still have to experiment with most user interfaces to get them right. As a simple example, consider Don Hopkins' recent tabframes posting. An extra goody added in tabframes is the edge-stretch thingies in the window borders. You can now stretch one edge easily, without inadvertently stretching the other edge connected to your corner-stretch thingie. Why did the OpenLook designers never think of this? SunView had that basic capability, albeit without visible window gadgetry. It wasn't like the idea was completely unheard of. I agree that running the XNeWS server with an alternate window manager is a viable option. Before I got my SPARCStation I used XNeWS in X11ONLY mode with gwm, which was the only ICCCM-compliant window manager I had available to me at the time. If you choose to use twm with XNeWS, I recommend you at least try the X11R4 version. Cmdtool/shelltool both stink under XNeWS. Use the version of xterm that Sun placed in the demo subdirectory of $OPENWINHOME. (The MIT version, as of X11R3, didn't work properly with XNeWS.) There's no particular benefit to Sun's terminal emulators unless you're a textedit freak. Xterm is faster, has scrollbars, and VT100 and Tek 4010 emulation (for those rare occasions that it's needed). Sun has steadfastly maintained that the current XNeWS release is a "developers" release. Those people here who use it find it relatively stable at this point. On a SPARCStation with enough memory (16MBytes+) and a GX frame buffer it's really very pleasant to use, except for the OpenLook warts on pswm. Whether or not you want to release it to garden-variety users is another question, however. The server itself appears to be fine at this point. XNeWS does give you SunView executable compatibility, which I use frequently. While your SunView users may balk at the the user interface, they will be able to run old SunView programs in "compatibility mode". It's not perfect, but it works. (If you run in X11ONLY mode - which saves a lot of memory - you must manually set the WINDOW_PARENT and WMGR_ENV_PLACEHOLDER environment variables, typically to /dev/win0 and /dev/win1, respectively.) -- Skip (montanaro@crdgw1.ge.com)