This is neat but, TBH, i expected a recreation of the actual Program Manager (i.e. the launcher with the groups and icons) :-P
AFAIK back in the 90s there was some (proprietary, i think) Motif based program that looked very similar to Program Manager and some Linux distributions bundled it.
It'd be trivial to make something like it with -e.g.- Lazarus, especially if the subwindows/MDI part isn't needed and instead launch toplevel windows (which IMO is a better idea anyway as you can nest them, something i always felt was missing from the Win3.x Program Manager).
EDIT: for fun i tried to setup a Win3.1 theme for Gtk and put Lazarus (in a separate user account) with this window manager. It looks nice[0] though the WM seems to be lacking support for some common features for setting up window appearance (e.g. the completion window in the screenshot has a frame when it shouldn't and the window doesn't disappear but instead its contents become black - this happens for any window that is expected to remain around but hidden).
The company I worked at IXI [1] was the leading provider of Motif. We took the official release, fixed all the bugs, documented it, and sold it with most companies using Unix workstations buying licenses. We also did better versions of the window manager and file/program manager.
We had a product named Wintif that gave the Windows 3 look and feel to any Unix program using Motif, without any code changes to the program. The theory was you would display the Unix programs on a Windows PC running an X server, and they would look and feel like native Windows programs. See a glorious screenshot at [2] where all the programs and window manager are running on Unix using Wintif.
What happened is the Unix workstation market and hence Unix GUI applications rapidly diminished in favour of native Windows applications, with web applications taking off (and what we pivoted to). You'll notice the screenshot includes our version of Mosaic - the first mainstream web browser.
Judging from the links in the Wikipedia page and the other reply to my post, i think it was Looking Glass what i remembered, but this was also very interesting (especially the part about modifying Motif to look like Windows 3.1) :-).
Sometimes i wonder how hard it'd be to modify OpenMotif to add theme support.
Finally I can fulfill my username's destiny and compile a 32 bit version of this. If this supported virtual desktops I might actually daily drive this on my laptop.
Fun trivia of the day: Program Manager existed as a 32-bit binary from Windows NT 3.1 through Windows XP SP1.
Yes, you could get Windows XP SP1 to boot into Program Manager instead of Explorer if you so desired, and I would wager probably through Windows 10 32-bit too if you copied over the required files.
I has always assumed Program Manager's window decorations were inspired by
Motif but apparently it was the other way around, regarding
Presentation Manager; Program Manager's ancestor.
"Motif was directly inspired by the look and feel of the Presentation Manager interface"
In this day and age I think the mock-3d stuff in Motif looks gaudier than the classic look of both the Win 3.11 interface and the OS/2 Presentation Manager.
i think the "mock 3d" stuff was ultimately inspired by NextStep (1988), although they did it in a classier way than Windows, Motif, or the Mac (either in the late classic (8 or 9) or OSX)
Yeah I made this same point a few days ago on a similar topic about the use of the win95 style in SerenityOS, etc.
I remember back when NeXTstep was new, really lusting over one, but all I had was my little Atari ST.. and spending many hours writing up pretend 3d relief widgets in GFA Basic on it. We were in love with our colour palettes and the illusions they could give :-)
I loved the NeXT interface for years but it feels stylistically over the top to me now. Love the draggable menus tho.
Another GUI that had 3d relief that I feel did it really nice was Sun's OpenLook style. I used olwm as my window manager for many years. Always preferred that over Motif.
There's a Computer Chronicles episode somewhere on YouTube (doubtless also on archive.org in higher quality) where a Microsoft rep shows off Windows 3's user interface, and they outright say it looks like Presentation Manager, so it'll prepare users for OS/2. Back when MS hadn't decided to kill OS/2!
Nowadays how well are old-school X11 window managers doing necessary interop with the desktop bus to keep modern GTK/QT apps rendering correctly on 4K HiDPI screens? I was forced to give up on FVWM because tweaking my X resources Xft.dpi and GDK_SCALE settings for one app such as firefox in order to get it rendering correctly on a 4K screen would break other apps. Firefox only seemed to do HiDPI correctly when run under a full GNOME desktop that provides the dbus messages it is assuming to set the 200% font size and UI scale correctly. Is there a way to run an old-school X11 WM now that allows snaps/flatpacks/GNOME-bloat dbus apps to run without issue with 200% scaling on 4K screens?
The developer surely knew that there would be people that asked for the Program Manager, because it wasn't only a name for the desktop itself (like the Explorer with additional file manager windows). It was Windows. If you closed the Program Manager application, you were prompted a message box "Wanna exit Windows?"
So there's a difference between implementing Windows 3 style desktop, and implementing the Program Manager (as kind of an early Start Menu).
Isn't that literally just slightly different colors? I don't remember meaningful differences between OS/2 1.3 and the Windows 3 line. I always thought that was part of why WinOS2 worked well: the Win32 apps looked like the old OS/2 apps, both giving them familiarity and emphasizing they were old.
I never used OS/2 and most of what I’ve seen were from the final versions, so I had no idea it basically looked like Windows 3.x in the earliest versions.
The window borders were grey rather than black. That made a huge difference in the subtleness of the contours. The resizable borders were a bit thinner, IIRC (could be the grey outlines though.
Visible, discoverable UI control elements are (were?) such a nice thing. (I believe Apple also once endorsed those principles... until they decided to abandon them.)
I wish there were a way of turning visible controls back on in macOS/Windows/Ubuntu. Perhaps KDE still has them?
The /r/unixporn is a really weird place, in this case it's XFCE, so I feel like it makes more sense, but the most riced up desktops people post are always Sway, i3, dwm and similar. They are minimalist window managers, yet people go out of their way to customize them.
I assume you're referring to "rice". In the car scene, it stands for "race inspired cosmetic enhancement" and it's typically used to refer to things that make a car look fast without actually making it so. (Think big spoilers, non-functional intake scoops, etc.).
The term is used here to express a similar sentiment; a desktop environment that's made to take pretty screenshots but not necessarily be more functional, or enhance a certain workflow.
That’s a post hoc acryonym. The phrases like “rice rocket”, “rice burner”, etc. were applied to Japanese cars and motorcycles when those really started putting American companies and their enthusiast communities on the defensive. Whether or not that was an insult is debatable but the meaning was focused on Japan (whose business dominance was feared in the 1980s and early 90s).
Southern California had an Asian car culture which was all about customizing mostly Japanese imports, and there was a lot of debate in the 90s about the exact racial dynamics there (like other terms, some outsiders used it as an insult and some insiders wore it as a badge of pride). For fans of the early web, I’m amused to see this site is still around probably a quarter of a century after the last time I visited:
Pekwm has my favourite BeOS theme (https://www.pekwm.se/themes/benu.html) because it supports window grouping flawlessly, which turns every window into a potential tab just by dragging.
On a side note, I wonder if Wayland made it more difficult to have this kind of silly experimentation. X11, despite the legendary bad code quality, is a big leverage for lone coder.
Looks nice and simple (a good thing, not a bad thing) -- which would make it excellent for educational purposes (as well as tiny/embedded and/or highly secure systems)!
I have used Mac laptops as my daily driver for the last ten years after being a ride-or-die Linux guy for the 15 years before that.
I’m still more comfortable on Linux systems, though. Some things I dearly miss, in no particular order:
1) complete control over window management, an embarrassment of riches in terms of amazing and wacky window managers
2) {s,p, (and much later) d}trace; there are probably similar tools on Mac but I don’t need them badly enough to find and learn them —- but I know just enough about them in Linux-land to investigate frustrating things
... I thought there would be more when I started typing, but that might be it.
https://github.com/jcs/progman/commit/024a5d086657a70b5303d1...
https://github.com/jcs/progman/commit/3a427653be2d5117e162da...
I'd be giving these commit messages as examples of great commit messages.
Honorable mention xd: https://github.com/jcs/progman/commit/bd91f0f091c4656c246e7d...