Version 0.95.4 released

Window Maker 0.95.4 was released on January 3rd 2013. There was a major code cleanup related to icons, some changes in WPrefs, the addition of a new "Center" placement strategy, support for _NET_FRAME_EXTENTS, the removal of CPP dependency to process menu files and small fixes and improvements all around.

Version 0.95.3 released

Window Maker 0.95.3 was released on May 16th 2012. This release fixes a regression which would cause more than one instance of an application to start (under some circunstances) when using menu shortcuts. The window maximization procedures now have a more intuitive behavior with respect to remembering the old geometry and going back to it. Furthermore, there are some other small fixes and cleanups.

Version 0.95.2 released

Window Maker 0.95.2 was released on February 14th 2012, and it contains just a few commits on top of 0.95.1. They were necessary to fix a few issues like 'make dist' not compiling. Furthermore a few more code cleanups slipped in.

Version 0.95.1 released

Window Maker 0.95.1 was released on January 29th 2012.

The last official Window Maker release was version 0.92.0 from 2005, and version 0.95.1 contains many bug fixes and also a few new features.

New features and highlights

The following list is incomplete, but should give a first-order approximation to the new features in this release. For the truly curious among you, reading through git log is the only complete source of information.

• Left Half / Right Half Maximize.

• Maximus: tiled maximization. Maximizes a window such that it occupies the largest area without overlapping others.

• New mouse-resizing functionality. Windows can now be resized vertically (horizontally) using MOD+Wheel (CTRL+Wheel).

• History and TAB completion in dialogs. To use this new functionality in your old WMRootMenu, replace %a by %A in the relevant entry. It will look like this (Run..., SHEXEC, "%A(Run, Type command:)"). Or use wmgenmenu to generate a new menu.

• Bouncing appicon effect.

• New applications (wmgenmenu and wmmenugen) to generate the root menu automatically by looking which applications you have on your $PATH. Translations to German, Spanish and French of menus generated by wmgenmenu.

• Automatic detection of configuration changes. Linux users whose kernel supports the inotify mechanism have their configuration changes detected automatically without polling, reducing the number of CPU wakeups.

• Improved dockapp recognition.

• And many trivial things which reduce little annoyances one might have. For example, an option was added to control whether or not Window Maker should do automatic workspace switching to satisfy a focus request from a window located in another workspace.

• (For developers). The addition of a debian/ folder which allows the creation of a debian package for wmaker using the git sources.

• Added keyboard shortcut to uncover/cover the dock.

• Mac OS X-style window cycling.

• Preliminary XRandR support (needs a bit more work to be bug-free; not compiled in by default. Use --enable-xrandr if you want to test it).

Bug fixes

Window Maker 0.92.0 was already very stable, but many bugs were fixed in this release. A very incomplete list is given below, and as time permits it will be updated (including links to the commits) in the future. But the message now is that if you don't like bugs, use version 0.95.1.

• Fix loading saved states on 64-bit systems

• Fix to avoid a segfault when creating more than 81 workspaces, as reported on youtube here.

• Periodic focus bug.

Summary of changes

A lot of effort was put into cleaning up the code, with lots of code removal and tidying things up. The following output should give you an idea of the development in the last cycle:

git diff --shortstat wmaker-0.92.0+..wmaker-0.95.1
 592 files changed, 118361 insertions(+), 133342 deletions(-)
git diff --shortstat 688a56e8ab67b..wmaker-0.95.1
 566 files changed, 37676 insertions(+), 41817 deletions(-)