Salix Forums

Does anyone have any experience of Stumpwm, either with Salix, or another distro?

Stumpwm is a fork of Ratpoison with scripting in Lisp, rather as XMonad is extensible by hacking the source in Haskell. I don't know Lisp, but I was curious.

You first need to install Lisp (sbcl seems to be the preferred flavour) and some Lisp extensions (clx and cl-ppcre) with Quicklisp as the recommended means of doing so. (Based on

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Stumpwm

as well as stumpwm's own wiki and INSTALL file.)

This failed in Salix (though I will have another go when I have time). So I had a go in an Arch-derived distro, ArchBang; but that seems to be rather rickety, and I got sidetracked by keyboard layout problems. With a keyboard-driven WM, that's a pain. Also, the package management sucks.

Next step might be to try something Debian-based. But of course, what I'd really like is to get it working with Salix. Has anyone else?

... I managed to install it by following the instructions at the Arch wiki without deviation:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Stumpwm

(There is a warning about "invalid CVS version for Stumpwm" - something to investigate.)

However, rather than the sbcl available as a SlackBuild (1.0.50) I installed the latest version, 1.0.58, using this precompiled binary:

http://www.sbcl.org/getting.html

I have it in use alongside Ratpoison, and it isn't much different so far. I do feel the lack of certain in-house comforts available with Salix ratpoison (such as C-t e), but the whole point is, if you want it, roll your sleeves up and write it on the fly. Rather as with XMonad, there are a fair few web pages that make users' hacks available. You can't use your existing .ratpoisonrc as a starting-point, because .stumpwmrc is written in Lisp.

I'd say this could be a lot of fun for anyone who knows Lisp or would like to learn. However, it doesn't look like it's being very actively developed at the moment.