(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Doesd anyone know of a simple non-x11 or wayland based window manager still around? I was thinbking of playing with scm, which needed only two exe's to work but the OI toolkit is no longer available, even from the wayback machine.

thanks

HI scsijon.

Wooooo... Tough question. The best I can suggest is:
go through Giles Orr's Comprehensive List of WMs.
https://www.gilesorr.com/wm/table.html

Good luck!

scsijon wrote:Doesd anyone know of a simple non-x11 or wayland based window manager still around? I was thinbking of playing with scm, which needed only two exe's to work but the OI toolkit is no longer available, even from the wayback machine.

Can you give more details on what you're trying to accomplish? There are several alternatives to X Windows and some have window managers. Wasn't clear if you were looking for Wayland options or did not want Wayland options. If you are looking for a Wayland option, this project might be of interest:
https://github.com/michaelforney/swc
https://github.com/michaelforney/velox

If you want to avoid X Windows completely, there are framebuffer based options. I have some X Windows alternatives listed here:
https://lmemsm.dreamwidth.org/9311.html
DirectFB had a window manager project. NanoLinux uses SLWM as a window manager. If you're using a terminal, there are several options to handle multiple windows and run applications in them such as dvtm and splitvt. I have a list in the X Windows alternatives article.

You might also be able to look up SDL based window managers. SDL 1.2.x was able to run without X Windows. When I run a search of SDL and window manager, I noticed two options:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/zwm/
https://libagar.org/
zwm isn't currently maintained. agar is more of a GUI library but the documentation mentioned that it can "operate as a self-contained window-manager".

Don't know if any of these resources are helpful for you, but thought I'd share what I'd found. Would be interested to hear if you find anything else useful.

This is probably not want you want, but mlterm (a terminal emulator) can be compiled to
support framebuffer ... you get the binary mlterm-fb ..

You can split windows vertically or horizontally with mlterm, and it also has great support
for libsixel, images, etc.

So, you could use it with ranger, vifm or similar...

I used it on framebuffer with ranger, it's like having the Mac file manager (Finder) available on console,
but with much better file previews and way more powerful commands just a few (vim-like) keystrokes away

(mlterm-fb, ranger and micro (a modern text editor for the terminal) all support mulltiple tabs and splits, so you get a really nice no-X experience if you use them together..)