Default window manager switched to CTWM in NetBSD-current
For more than 20 years, NetBSD has shipped X11 with the "classic" default window manager of twm. However, it's been showing its age for a long time now.
In 2015, ctwm was imported, but after that no progress was made. ctwm is a fork of twm with some extra features - the primary advantages are that it's still incredibly lightweight, but highly configurable, and has support for virtual desktops, as well as a NetBSD-compatible license and ongoing development. Thanks to its configuration options, we can provide a default experience that's much more usable to people experienced with other operating systems.
Recently, I've been installing NetBSD with some people in real life and was inspired by their reactions to the default twm to improve the situation, so I played with ctwm, wrote a config, and used it myself for a week. It's now the default in NetBSD-current.
We gain some nice features like an auto-generated application menu (that will fill up as packages are installed to /usr/pkg), and a range of useful keyboard shortcuts including volume controls - the default config should be fully usable without a mouse. It should also work at a range of screen resolutions. We can add HiDPI support after some larger bitmap fonts are imported - another advantage of ctwm is that we can support very slow and very fast hardware with one config.
If you're curious about ctwm, check out the ctwm website. It's also included in previous NetBSD releases, though not as the default window manager and not with this config.
[8 comments]
Posted by Rando on September 29, 2020 at 07:11 AM UTC #
Posted by Elena on September 29, 2020 at 12:39 PM UTC #
Posted by CTOSian on October 01, 2020 at 12:02 PM UTC #
Posted by Will on October 03, 2020 at 07:15 PM UTC #
Posted by guest01 on October 14, 2020 at 11:18 PM UTC #
Posted by guest01 on October 24, 2020 at 01:24 PM UTC #
Posted by Unixery on November 03, 2020 at 02:33 PM UTC #
Posted by Ron on November 05, 2020 at 06:07 PM UTC #