1y ago

All Ruby, all the time (almost)

Most of my workspaces are tiling (bspwm), but I have one where all windows are floated.

This is showcasing my own (very minimalist; ~300 lines) unreleased desktop manager written in pure Ruby, using a Ruby font renderer and Ruby X11 client library (both on github), and showing a custom menu written in Ruby that auto-populates with actions based on directory contents, and showing my Ruby terminal showcasing double-width and double-height support (xterm has it, but few others), and a window showing me editing my Ruby text editor with itself...

Oh, and Polybar. One of the terminals is st - the Ruby terminal is a bit wobbly in a few respects still, though I use it more and more. So there are a few non-Ruby bits left. So far.

9 comments

You win

Pretty cool idea. The few lines of code also make it easy to rewrite in case you want to switch to wayland.
- Thanks. I'm in no rush, but yeah, it's all very small. They depend pretty much on a handful of X calls at the moment, and aiming to isolate that in a couple of very small classes, so should be very simple. Hoping to clean it up and push more of these to github soon.

Looks awesome, I love Ruby!! For even more ruby you could swap bspwm with subtle, whose config file is written in ruby :) (subtle itself isn't though sadly)
- That's an interesting one I'd missed. Thanks :)
  It might just tempt me to ditch bspwm, or at least experiment. I use little enough of bspwm capabilities, so it might be feasible. I have also lightly toyed with the idea of writing my own, as since I don't use menu bars etc. even on my floating screen (the "menu bars" in my desktop manager are just client rendered titles) I really need very few capabilities. Basically pretty much just a placement function similar-ish to bspwm, and the ability to move and resize and float windows.
  On the other hand, a truly minimalist WM is <100 lines, so I might consider writing one from scratch too (I'd need to update the Ruby X11 binding to handle StructureNotify events and add a few more calls, but that's pretty trivial). Though at this point we're quickly approaching zealotry :) It would be fun, though. Maybe when I'm done replacing the terminal fully...
  
  A ruby-written window manager would be too cool, I'd check it out! Although unfortunately I've switched to Wayland months ago and I know Wayland is a lot harder to write for... ah well :)

9 comments