Twindy 0.45 review

Twindy is a window manager for linux and possibly any system running an X server, inspired by Tracktion, the multitrack audio editor/

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Niall Moody

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Twindy is a window manager for linux and possibly any system running an X server, inspired by Tracktion, the multitrack audio editor/sequencer for Windows and OS X.

Twindy tries to apply Tracktion's workflow, where everything is on screen at once, to a window manager.

As such, there are two panels, a main panel where new windows/programs open by default and may be selected using tabs, and a lower panel, which can only hold one window/program at a time.

The idea is that you'll do your main work in the top panel, and use the bottom panel for a terminal, or a file manager you'd want to keep open. See the screenshots page for some examples.

The philosophy behind Twindy isn't particularly complicated:

Twindy is intended to be as simple as possible. That means it is only a window manager - it's not intended to become a huge Desktop Environment like KDE/Gnome, with all sorts of applications developed specifically for it.
All Twindy's options must be configurable from Twindy itself - there shouldn't be any messing about with configuration files necessary. (okay, we're not there yet, but eventually...)
Twindy should be fairly lightweight - I'm not entirely sure how well it succeeds in this yet, as I don't have a low-ish spec machine to test it on, but on my P4 laptop, it only takes up ~10MB while running, which I reckon is pretty good, compared to Gnome and KDE. Since it uses JUCE to do pretty much everything, it should be pretty good on this front, and it's got very few dependencies (basically the X libs, and freetype).

Here are some key features of "Twindy":
Windows are automatically mapped to either the upper or lower panel, and fixed in position.
Upper window panels are tabbed.
Fully customisable colour scheme, colours are read from .tracktionscheme files, so you can import your favourite Tracktion 2 scheme. This is probably the best place to find .tracktionschemes.
You don't have to start it from an xterm anymore!
Fourteen user-customisable buttons in the lower left corner, which can be set to open a popup menu with a number of program entries, or just start a particular program.
Can run any number of programs at startup (particularly useful for gnome-settings-daemon).
Clicking the clock switches between showing the current time, or the date.

What's New in This Release:
The code now works when compiled with GCC 4.
Some minor feature additions and a number of bugfixes were made, mostly related to the preferences pages.