window system
W is a simple, socket based, mainly two-color window system created
originally by Torsten Scherer and currently "maintained" by
Eero Tamminen. W has no relation to that X's predecessor with
a same name. W 1 release 4 main features are:
- Uses sockets for communicating with client applications. Works
either locally or remotely (assumes both ends have same int size).
- Terminal emulator (wterm) with color and mouse support. Wvt
terminal supports also history and copy / paste.
- Supports line, box, circle, ellipse, pie, polygon and bezier
graphics functions in solid and patterned modes. Most support
only line width of one.
- Replace, clear, invert and transparent graphics modes (block
and text functions use only replace mode).
- Supports both monospaced and proportional bitmap fonts.
Different font styles can be achieved either by setting the
desired font style for the window or by loading an appropiate
font. There's a converter for converting X BDF fonts to W
fonts.
- Graphics primitives are offset to a window and window contents
are stored by the server (redraws are also performed by the server).
- Server has window manager builtin (focus follows mouse). Windows
can have title, close and iconization gadgets. Windows can be
resized from any of their borders.
- Windows can have subwindows. Every window has it's own graphics
context (graphics mode, pattern, font, color).
- A widget toolkit for easing up user interface creation. There's
also an X11 version of the W libary called W2Xlib, so you
can run and debug your W apps under X too. Alternatively you can
run the W server in an X11 window using e.g. the SDL
backend.
- W window system was mostly designed to be two color (monochome)
but has also support for 8-bit palettized colors.
- Smallish. W server and applications take about 1/4 of the RAM and
disk space needed by X11R5 (when comparing statically linked
binaries). Using W server on color mode may increase it's memory
use over that of X because of the window backup bitmaps though.
- Has been reported at times to work on m68k/x86 Linux, Atari MiNT,
MacMiNT, SunOS, Amiga NetBSD, Agenda VR at least with one
graphics device / on some graphics mode. On Linux there are
backends for SDL, framebuffer, GGI and SVGAlib. See for
technical info to see what graphics modes W supports.
To compile and use W you'll need a small unix like setup (GNU C,
make and linker + unix C-library) with networking (sockets), some
method to access graphics memory linearly, at least 4MB of RAM and
10MB of free disk space.
Other information:
Obsolete information:
W1R4 sources are currently available available from
my WWW-page.