Ion (window manager)

Ion is a window manager for the X11 windowing system. The since version 2 under the LGPL (modified from version 3) licensed Window Manager is the successor of PWM.

Window Management

The most striking peculiarity ion is that windows never overlap as a rule. The screen is divided into different areas to (frames), which may be located one or more windows in an area. Thus the whole screen is always used by the window. Are located in an area more than one window, this is marked by tab.

Alternatively, ion also provides a mode in which windows can be freely moved and can be grouped. The surface behaves in this case as PWM or Fluxbox and is intended for applications that do not fall into a normal ion - around use as well, such as GIMP.

Operation

One advantage of the window organization that operates ion, is the possibility of simple keyboard operation. Operations that bring a window to the foreground or to the background cease to exist and the user can work directly with direction information, the areas or with figures choose a window of an area.

Ion provides integrated input lines that resemble the minibuffer emacs. These can be used to launch applications, perform ion - command or a window name to enter, to jump to the ion. All of these input lines to support automatic completion and editing of the line.

Extension

Only the core of the window manager is written in the C programming language. Large parts of the program are available in the language Lua. All elements of the window manager are in an object-oriented interface is available and usable in scripts. This allows ion expand extensive as the script collection points to the ion homepage.

Similar window manager: Larswm, WMI

License problems

The license of Ion3 forcing suppliers of package sources that do not offer the final release version of the author, not later than 28 days after the last release to mark their packages as obsolete and unsupported. In addition, they only allowed under restrictions change the source code:

"Versions not based on the copyright holder 's latest release (on the CORRESPONDING " branch ": such as Ion3 ( tm ) ), must within 28 days of this release, be prominently marked as ( Potentially ) obsolete and unsupported.

Significantly altered versions ' may be Provided only if the user requests Explicitly For Those Corrections to be Applied, and is prominently Notified did the software is no longer Considered the standard version, and is not supported by the copyright holder. The version string Displayed by the program must describe the synthesis Modifications and the "support void " status. "

After the developer of Ion3 had threatened to take legal action to enforce this license, including the Projects Arch Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD removed the packages from Ion3 from their repositories. Gentoo Linux also provides for the licensing issues on only the first version.