Sawfish

This page collects the bits and pieces of code for use with the programmable window manager for X11, Sawfish. Some of this is in the form of themes (programs in the sawfish extension language that change the visual appearance of your windows), some of it in the form of extensions (programs in the sawfish extension language that change the behaviour of your windows in some way). All of these are copyright Jason F. McBrayer 2001, and licensed under the GNU Public License.

Themes

These are the themes I've written for sawfish. Click on the thumbnails for a full-sized image of the theme in use.

Sanity

This theme is designed to provide a simple, clean user interface that adapts to your preferences. Colors and button orders can be configured, but sane defaults and smart gtkrc matching means that in most cases, they won't need to be.

I wrote this theme with the idea of producing a theme with the usability features of the various MacOS-inspired themes out there, but with a softer, more rounded appearance, and better gtk integration. Use with the GTK theme engine 'Flat' for the look in the screenshot.

twm-traditional

This theme matches the appearance of the standard X11 window manager, twm. It is based on the twm theme written by John Harper and distributed with Sawfish, but it has a few improvements. Notably: it has a resize button like TWM, it can compress its titlebars like twm, and its borders behave more like real twm.

If you use the twm-traditional theme, you may want to set your resize mode to 'grab and your move/resize animations to 'box.

Extensions

Global menu support

If you load this module, you will have support for a single global application menu for applications that support it according to the standards set by the X Desktop Group. Right now, this is all KDE applications, and if you are using the globalmenu patches to Gnome, most Gnome applications.

The application menu can be positioned various ways: at the top of the screen, in a fixed position (e.g. floating over the Gnome panel as in this screenshot, across the top or bottom of the screen, or below the Gnome panel).

Usage: (require 'global-menu). You will have to configure Gnome and KDE to use a global menu. While KDE supports a global menu 'out of the box', Gnome requires patches to gnome-libs and control-center. The global menu patches for Gnome can be found here.

Improved Single Window Mode

This script provides improved support for the 'single-window mode' that was in early betas of MacOS X. Basically, it enforces a policy of one window on screen at a time. This version does a better job of really enforcing that policy than the version included in sawfish.

This is a modified version of some code posted to the sawmill mailing list. If you're the original author, please contact me so that I can properly credit you.

Usage: (require 'single-window-mode) will give you a number of new commands. You probably want to bind single-window-mode-toggle to a button using the bindings page of the sawfish configurator.