MGR, sometimes said to be short for “ManaGeR”, sometimes short for “Munger”, is a simple network transparent window system. It was originally developed for the Sun 3 series of workstations by Stephen Uhler and colleagues beginning in 1984 while at Bellcore (later Telcordia, now part of Ericsson) and later enhanced by many others.
The window system ran on many different hardware platforms, at least these: Sun 3/xx workstations running SunOS, which was the the original development platform, Sun SPARCstations (SunOS and then ported by me to Solaris), Intel x86 based PCs (Coherent, Minix, FreeBSD or Linux), Atari ST (under MiNT), AT&T UnixPC (SysV) and the Macintosh.
I had never heard of MGR before, so this was a great read.
I have mentioned it here in the past in the comments here:
https://www.osnews.com/story/134983/doom-ported-to-xenix-last-year/
https://www.osnews.com/story/30655/tinywm-a-tiny-window-manager/
The source code is here I also have a forked copy some updates where made a few years ago when I talked to the guy who put it up on github, the mouse support probably still has some issues though:
https://github.com/hyc/mgr
MGR is similar to the window manager on the AT&T Unix PC and the Unix PC can run MGR with some modificaitons… note the above code did compile when I played around with it a few years ago.
It would be a pretty decent UI for retroBSD etc… anyway the above code runs in a window hosted on X11 so its quite easy to play with.
I do recall reading your comments on a Xenix article as well. Never heard of it either till then.
Also the fellow that posted it is Howard Chu in case anyone wonders he’s the chief architect of OpenLDAP.
See here for me stumbling through building it:
https://github.com/hyc/mgr/issues/1
Here is an image of it working on a modern system:
https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1026000/10118671/53bed6e8-644c-11e5-9eef-d4afed13954e.png
It mentioned Lysator… then it has to be good. I have to try it. But considing that most went on to amiwm later on means that something in MGR might not have been what they wanted. Lysator is still the main repo for amiwm, and allthough debian is stuck with the 1998 version does not mean you have to (latest version is from 2010+). Try it, it is different, your workspaces are papers and you drag them hence and fourth and switch between them with an icon on the top right. With a supported gpu any linux computer with flexx can do it on a lowly 486 in decent speeds.
It simplifies workflows in a way most can not imagine, you can only move a window of paper if you hold shift outside the boundaries, but it is easy to send them between papers, and there is hundreds of customization options, you can set a moving video as you wallpaper if you like, or a 6gb image from the hubble telescope (if you have the space to store it) in another.
Configuration is NOT easy and documentation in most distros refer to the 1998 version, and most functions as they should, some do not. A good example is the clock. If you want a clock in the paperholder and not on the paper (xclock) then you have to define that for all the papers or set a global value for that to happen.
Edit: The config file is also where you edit how many papers you want. You can have a whole book if you want. I usually stay with 16 as a base config.
Was and is my main desktop to this day since i left BeOS.
Yeah MGR does have limitations but it should be very simple to write applications for since its primarily a CLI multiplexer think of it as an overgrown TMUX that can window and also display some graphics.
The way graphical windows in MGR are manipulated is more similar to terminals that more modern graphics…but also means its simpler and more lightweight.
NeWS, or Sun’s Networked Windows System was superior in all ways to MGR and to X.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
Except it was slower than X and use way more resources than MGR. So, basically not superior at all. Shoveling an interpreter into your GUI frankly is a bad idea.
I’m sure a superior NeWS server could have been written but it never was… while X continued to improve and didn’t have some of the problems news had with performance, licensing, and support.
well … “superior” is very relative … NeWS needs way way more resources (RAM and CPU) is much more complex. The NeWS interpreter is fully Turing complete, which allows every window to eat up all available cpu cycles …
In many ways NeWS is much more like HTML/JS/CSS today, except is was based on DisplayPostScript …
MGR is a much simpler but in my view also a more elegant solution …
That is what NextStep was.
The screenshot have me serious UWM feelings.