Comment by badsectoracula | Hacker News Reader

Comment by badsectoracula | Hacker News Reader

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).

https://i.imgur.com/Hpieb0g.png

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IXI_Limited

[2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/avaragado/5334440376/

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.

Caldera Linux included Looking Glass[1] which was vaguely Windows-like and commercial. Not sure if that's what you were thinking of.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Glass_(UNIX_desktop)

Doesn't look that different from Motif/CDE, they were ubiquitous back in the day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(software)

Yes, Looking Glass is what i had in mind though i think i remembered it closer to the screenshot shown in this post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageunix/comments/ch3xl1/caldera...

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