GUI

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General

Startup

  • fbsplash (formerly gensplash) is a userspace implementation of a splash screen for Linux systems. It provides a graphical environment during system boot using the Linux framebuffer layer.
Q: "I get a tty1 login before KDM pops up."
A: "You could disable tty1. Comment out this line in /etc/inittab: 
  c1:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -8 38400 tty1 linux"

X

Xwindows drives the underlying graphical interface of most if not all Unix/Linux computers providing a GUI. It was developed in 1984 at MIT. After around 35 years of development, tweaking and adding of new hardware and ideas, it is generally acknowledged to be a bit of a beast. It should be remembered that the common configuration at time of development was a single mini running X providing individual views to Xterminals in a timesharing system. Nowadays the norm is X providing a single screen on a desktop or laptop.

All of this means that there are many ways of achieving the same thing and many slightly different things that can meet the same purpose. In modern X versions sometimes you can get away with limited or no configuration. In the last few years the boast is that X is self configuring. Certainly the best practice rule of thumb is less configuration is better - that is only configure what is wrong.

  • Xplain - Explaining X11 for the rest of us [1]

Config

xrdb
xset

Sessions

xrandr

xrandr -q
  show possible and current screen resolutions

xdpyinfo | grep 'dimensions:'
  show just current screen resolution in px and mm

Dualscreen

Multihead

GUI

Utils


  • xwit is an X window interface tool. By default when used with no arguments in an xterm it de-iconifies and raises the window. You can specify a different function to do, such as iconifying the window, and apply it to several windows whose name begins with one of the given strings, or a particular window id given, or the window id found in the environment variable WINDOWID (which is set by xterm for the program it runs), or the window under the mouse cursor.
  • xinput - utility to configure and test X input devices
  • devilspie
  • telak is a program which displays pictures in root window. It can display content of local file, or download image via http. Telak can be configured to refetch picture every n seconds, so it can be used to display image from webcam.

Xnest

X Forwarding

Xrcp

Display Managers

X Display Manager is used to start a session from a local system or from another computer. The request and the start of the session is handled by the XDMCP, which stands for "X Display Manager Control Protocol" and is a network protocol. It provides a way of running the X-Terminal to run on your PC (or MAC) and it uses the X Server to provide a client/server interface between display hardware (the mouse, keyboard, and video displays) and the desktop environment while also providing both the windowing infrastructure and a standardized application interface (quoted from XFree86 Project home page)

Sharing

Pointer

Backgrounds

Fonts

Some fonts like terminus-font are installed in /usr/share/fonts/local, which is not added to the font path by default. By adding the following lines to ~/.xinitrc, the fonts can be used in X11: 

xset +fp /usr/share/fonts/local
xset fp rehash

Input

xmodmap

xbindkeys

~/.xbindkeysrc

sxhkd


~/.config/sxhkd/sxhkdrc

other

Cursor

xsetroot -cursor_name left_ptr

freedesktop.org

ICCCM

  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-Client_Communication_Conventions_Manual - ICCCM or I39L short for "I", 39 letters and "L")[1] is a standard for interoperability between X Window System clients of the same X server. It is primarily used for communication between normal clients and the window manager. X deliberately specifies "mechanism, not policy". As such, an additional specification beyond the X protocol itself was needed for client interoperation. The ICCCM specifies cut and paste buffers, window manager interaction, session management, how to manipulate shared resources and how to manage device colours. These low-level functions are generally implemented within widget toolkits or desktop environments, meaning that application programmers rarely work directly with the ICCCM itself but instead use the higher-level toolkit functions that implement it.

EWMH

  • ewmhstatus - Outputs the current EWMH desktop name and window title
  • wmctrl is a UNIX/Linux command line tool to interact with an EWMH/NetWM compatible X Window Manager.

3D

Compositing

Older

Compton

  • Compton - "I was frustrated by the low amount of standalone lightweight compositors. Compton was forked from Dana Jansens' fork of xcompmgr and refactored. I fixed whatever bug I found, and added features I wanted. Things seem stable, but don't quote me on it. I will most likely be actively working on this until I get the features I want. This is also a learning experience for me. That is, I'm partially doing this out of a desire to learn Xlib."

Unagi

Window Managers

Ultrix Window Manager

1985

twm

1987

swm

1990

vtwm

1990

tvtwm

1990

CTWM

1992

Motif Window Manager

1992

fvwm

1993

9wm

1994

olvm / olvwm

1996?

AmiWM

1996?

Xfce

1996

wm2 / wmx

1996 / 1998

PieWM

1997

Window Maker

1997

Blackbox

1997

Enlightenment

1997

  • Enlightenment is not just a window manager for Linux/X11 and others, but also a whole suite of libraries to help you create beautiful user interfaces with much less work than doing it the old fashioned way and fighting with traditional toolkits, not to mention a traditional window manager. It covers uses from small mobile devices like phones all the way to powerful multi-core desktops (which are the primary development environment).

IceWM

1997

MLVWM

1997

4Dwm

1998?

aewm

1998

AfterStep

1999

Scwm

1999

Ion

2000

PWM

2000

Sawfish

2000

  • Sawfish is an extensible window manager using a Lisp-based scripting language. Its policy is very minimal compared to most window managers. Its aim is simply to manage windows in the most flexible and attractive manner possible. All high-level WM functions are implemented in Lisp for future extensibility or redefinition. what i wanted when using litestep

larswm

2000

ratpoison

2000

PLWM

2000

Fluxbox

2001

WindowLab

2001

Openbox

2002

Metacity

2002

Hackedbox

2002

Oroborus

2002

NovaWM

2002

Stumpwm

2003

cwm

2004

wmii

2005

pekwm

2005

JWM

2005

dwm

2006

spectrwm

2006

  • spectrwm is a small dynamic tiling window manager for X11. It tries to stay out of the way so that valuable screen real estate can be used for much more important stuff. It has sane defaults and does not require one to learn a language to do any configuration. It was written by hackers for hackers and it strives to be small, compact and fast. It was largely inspired by xmonad and dwm.

flwm

2006?

Matchbox

2007

evilwm

2007

xmonad

2007

  • xmonad is a dynamically tiling X11 window manager that is written and configured in Haskell. In a normal WM, you spend half your time aligning and searching for windows. xmonad makes work easier, by automating this.

Config

cabal --recompile
  after changing ~/.xmonad/xmonad.hs

Utils

dzen
xmobar
taffybar

Hotkeys

mod shift enter
  start terminal
mod shift c
  close current window

mod w
  reload xmonad

mod space
  rotate through window layouts
mod shift space
  reset to workspace default
mod tab
  tab through windows
super 2
  switch to workspace 2

Awesome

2007

Config

echo 'naughty.notify({ text = "hello from tty" })' | awesome-client

debug rc.lua changes; 

Xephyr :1 -ac -br -noreset -screen 1152x720 &
DISPLAY=:1.0 awesome -c ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua.new

If xdg/awesome default config loads instead of .config/awesome, this is due to error in the rc.lua.

Usage

[mod]-Enter
  new terminal window
[mod]-c
  close window

[mod]-j
  rotate window selection clockwise
[mod]-k
  rotate window selection anticlockwise
[mod]-J
  move active window clockwise
[mod]-K
  move active window anticlockwise

[mod]-f
  fullscreen active window

[mod]-a
  create new tag
[mod]-s
  rename active tag

[mod]-shift-r
  reload awesome (to resource config)

Multihead

Wibox

Widgets

Colours

The color format in awesome is either a standard X color name (blue, darkblue, lightred, etc) or a hexadecimal formatted color (#rrggbb or #rrggbbaa). By using the hexadecimal format, you can also specify an alpha channel: that means that #00ff00 will draw pure green, but #00ff00aa will set the alpha channel to ‘aa’ and will blend the green with the color under it.

Text format

You can use Pango markup in a text string. This allows formating the text rendered inside widgets. Pango markup documentation can be found in the Pango documentation at http://library.gnome.org/devel/pango/stable/PangoMarkupFormat.html.

A Pango markup example: ….

Shifty

Revelation

Expose-like client selection.

Freedesktop menu

MPD

Other

3.5

subtle

2007

  • subtle is a manual tiling window manager with a rather uncommon approach of tiling: Instead of relying on predefined layouts, subtle divides the screen into a grid with customizeable slots (called gravities). For better understanding, the default config uses a 3x3 grid and maps each gravity to one key of the numpad. With those keys, windows can be moved directly to the desired gravity - the same can be done with tagging rules in the config. Another unique concept is the strict tagging: Unlike other tiling window managers, subtle doesn't allow weak tagging and always maps windows to virtual desktops (called views) with matching tags, regardless of the current active view.

Echinus

2007

Tritium

2007?

SithWM

2007

wmfs

2008

CLFSWM

2008

Lucca WM

2008?

i3

2009

based on wmii

Notion

2010

Musca

2009

Bluetile

2010

  • Bluetile is a tiling window manager for Linux, designed to integrate with the GNOME desktop environment. It provides both a traditional, stacking layout mode as well as tiling layouts where windows are arranged to use the entire screen without overlapping. Bluetile tries to make the tiling paradigm easily accessible to users coming from traditional window managers by drawing on known conventions and providing both mouse and keyboard access for all features. based on Xmonad

mcwm

2010

catwm

2010

euclid-wm

2010

herbstluftwm

2011

Monsterwm

2011

  • Monsterwm is a minimal, lightweight, tiny but monstrous dynamic tiling window manager. It will try to stay as small as possible. Currently under 700 lines with the config file included. It provides a set of four different layout modes (vertical stack, bottom stack, grid and monocle/fullscreen) by default, and has floating mode support. Each virtual desktop has its own properties, unaffected by other desktops' settings. Finally monsterwm supports multiple monitors setups.

tilenol

2011

nwm

2011

  • nwm - A dynamic window manager for X11 written with Node.js

Mer

2011

dminiwm / snapwm

2011

wingo

2011

Aura

TTWM / Alopex

2012

  • https://github.com/TrilbyWhite/alopex
  • https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Alopex
  • TTWM is a minimal tiling window manager combining concepts or elements from TinyWM, DWM, and i3wm. Inspiration has also been drawn from other great tilers like MonserWM. TinyTiler is currently under 650 lines of code. In contrast to other tilers, TinyTiler does not have modes nor does have window rules. TinyTiler has only two layouts: right stack and bottom stack. These choices were by design. TinyTiler instead provides two screen sections, the master and the stack. In TinyTiler only one stack window is visibile at a time, the others have tabs in the statusbar.

Qtile

2012

Goomwwm

2012

bspwm

2012

Very slick and atomic. 

.config/bspwm/autostart

bspc set focused_border_color '#ff0000'
bspc set border_width '3px'
bspc set window_gap 0
bspc set focus_follows_pointer true

Deep Space Window Manager

2012

Piwm

2013

  • Piwm is a very small window manager written in Bash. Following are the 5 task it performs : 1) Ctrl + t : Opens xterm, 2) Ctrl + f : Makes current window full screen, 3) Alt + Mouseleft : Moves the window, 4) Alt + Mouseright : Rescales the window, 5) Ctrl + F1 : Refocus the window

howm

2014

other tiling

Desktop environment

as DEs are fairly tightly integrated, a full DE install is required for proper running and configuration of their component apps

OpenWindows

1989-2000, Sun Microsystems

CDE

1993-

GNOME

shellshape

Consort

MATE

KDE

LXDE / LXQt

ROX

  • ROX is a fast, user friendly desktop which makes extensive use of drag-and-drop. The interface revolves around the file manager, or filer, following the traditional Unix view that `everything is a file' rather than trying to hide the filesystem beneath start menus, wizards, or druids. The aim is to make a system that is well designed and clearly presented. The ROX style favours using several small programs together instead of creating all-in-one mega-applications.

Sugar

other

System GUI

Panel / Taskbar

System tray

Launchers

  • Kupfer is an interface for quick and convenient access to applications and their documents. The most typical use is to find a specific application and launch it. We have tried to make Kupfer easy to extend with plugins so that this quick-access paradigm can be extended to many more objects than just applications.
  • Services menu is an application that helps the user perform actions on text in other programs. The user simply selects some text and launches Services — for example, by keyboard shortcut or clicking the fourth mouse button. A menu pops up letting the user edit the text and select desired operation, such as open a browser window searching for the text in Google.
  • Ayr is a Bash script which lets you manage menus of application launchers, which can be either executables or desktop files. It also opens files and URIs with launchers, desktop files, or applications associated by name or MIME-type. Launchers can be grouped and/or made read-only with tags, and the menu of launchers can be ordered in various ways, including the frequency or recency of launcher usage. Desktop files and MIME-type file associations are detected according to the XDG Base Directory Specification and Association between MIME types and applications standards, as far as is practical, and a wrapper is provided to let ayr function as an xdg-open replacement. Great for integrating with minimal desktop environments and file managers. Ayr uses dmenu to manage its menus. Once installed, execute the command 'ayr -h' for much more information.

dmenu

  • dmenu2 is the fork of original dmenu - an efficient dynamic menu for X, patched with XFT, quiet, x & y, token, fuzzy matching, follow focus, tab nav, filter. Added option to set screen on which dmenu apperars, as long as opacity, window class and window name. Also allows to dim screen with selected color and opacity while dmenu2 is running. Added underline color and height. (options -uc and -uh)

Task switcher

Virtual desktop pagers

Infos

Conky

Other

  • inxi - A newer, better system information script for irc, administration, and system troubleshooters.

Notifications

Widgets

Icons

On Screen Display

  • ghosd -- on-screen display (osd) with transparency

Volume

other

  • fsv (pronounced eff-ess-vee) is a file system visualizer in cyberspace. It lays out files and directories in three dimensions, geometrically representing the file system hierarchy to allow visual overview and analysis. fsv can visualize a modest home directory, a workstation's hard drive, or any arbitrarily large collection of files, limited only by the host computer's memory and graphics hardware. "i know this!"

Tiling

For non tiling WMs

Screensaver and locks

  • XScreenSaver is the standard screen saver collection shipped on most Linux and Unix systems running the X11 Window System. I released the first version in 1992. I ported it to MacOS X in 2006, and to iOS in 2012. On X11 systems, XScreenSaver is two things: it is both a large collection of screen savers; and it is also the framework for blanking and locking the screen.

Monitor

xset dpms force standby 

xset -dpms
  turn off power saving
xset +dpms
  turn on power saving

xset s off
  then off screensaver

Screenshot

scrot mydesktop.png

scrot '%Y-%m-%d_$wx$h.png' -e 'mv $f ~/documents/images/screenshots/'
  would create a file called something like 2000-10-30_2560x1024.png in a screenshots directory.

import -window root Pictures/Image5.png
  imagemagick

Colour

Widget toolkits

Xaw

OPEN LOOK

FLTK

1992

wxWidgets

1992

GTK+

Used by GNOME

GTK2 theming

Tools
  • Zenity is a tool that allows you to display Gtk+ dialog boxes from the command line and through shell scripts. It is similar to gdialog, but is intended to be saner. It comes from the same family as dialog, Xdialog, and cdialog, but it surpasses those projects by having a cooler name.
  • GtkOrphan (a Perl/Gtk2 application for debian systems) is a graphical tool which analyzes the status of your installations, looking for orphaned libraries. It implements a GUI front-end for deborphan, adding the package-removal capability.

GTK3 theming

Clutter

Qt

qtconfig qt4

Desktop/menu files

File managers

PCManFM

SpaceFM

QTFM

Sunflower

Other

Screen magnification

Multitouch

  • TUIO is an open framework that defines a common protocol and API for tangible multitouch surfaces. The TUIO protocol allows the transmission of an abstract description of interactive surfaces, including touch events and tangible object states. This protocol encodes control data from a tracker application (e.g. based on computer vision) and sends it to any client application that is capable of decoding the protocol. There exists a growing number of TUIO enabled tracker applications and TUIO client libraries for various programming environments, as well as applications that support the protocol.
  • Glassomium - Open-source cross-platform web-based TUIO-enabled multi-touch window manager
  • reacTIVision is an open source, cross-platform computer vision framework for the fast and robust tracking of fiducial markers attached onto physical objects, as well as for multi-touch finger tracking. It was mainly designed as a toolkit for the rapid development of table-based tangible user interfaces (TUI) and multi-touch interactive surfaces.


  • The Natural User Interface Group is an open source community that creates and shares interaction techniques & standards that benefit designers & developers throughout the world. We offer a collaborative environment for scientists that are interested in learning and developing modern Human/Computer Interaction methods and concepts. Our research includes topics such as: computer vision, touch computing, voice & gesture recognition, experience design and information visualization.

Remote

History

other

Clipboard

The PRIMARY selection is used when you select some text with the mouse. You usually paste it using the middle button. The CLIPBOARD selection is used when you copy text by using, for example, the Edit/Copy menu. You may paste it using the Edit/Paste menu. 

Shift-Insert
  paste clipboard selection (where ctrl-v isn't supported)


Wayland

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