Re: gtk icewm?

[robert havoc pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On Mon, 18 May 1998, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> 
> > when comparing menu popup speeds to say, gtk.. but IMO icewm is
> > currently too win95ish for Gnome.
> 
> I believe that arguing on the basis of how similar something is to
> Windows 95 is wrong.  We should be basing our arguments on the
> capabilities and the benefits.
> 

Yes! This is an excellent point. Just because the overall Windows OS is
kind of yucky doesn't mean we can't steal shamelessly from their
highly-paid UI researchers. We should copy Windows, Mac, NeXT, X, and
everything else we can think of to create a nice, familiar synthesis with
the best of each. In a real sense Different == Bad when it comes to look
and feel.

That said, I would love to see icewm borrow a few drawing routines from
Gtk for purely cosmetic reasons; it'd be neat if the task bar buttons
looked like Gtk buttons, and the "start" menu looked like a Gtk menu. I
don't know if actually using Gtk would be the fastest or best way to
achieve this or not. I guess I'd vote against using Gtk since icewm is
already fast, small, and stable - it ain't broke, don't fix. Using Gtk
would enable themes and so on but if you want that there's always E.

I think the icewm author is an excellent UI designer; it's clean,
consistent, attractive, fast, easy, and almost bug-free. It has all the
features you need and no more, and a professional polish I haven't seen in
any other wm except olvwm (though I haven't tried mwm/CDE). It made me
very happy when he said he'd Gnomify. We should copy icewm, not screw it
up.

Havoc