What is SAWFISH
Project Athena has decided to make Sawfish the default window manager
for users beginning with the fall 2001 semester. Sawfish is a
relatively new free-software window manager written by John Harper. By
default, Sawfish looks and behaves very much like Microsoft Windows,
but it can be easily be customized to behave like just about any other
graphical platform, and to have any of a wide variety of appearances.
By default, sawfish will raise and give focus to a window when it is
clicked on with the mouse, or when the button for that window in the
Gnome Tasklist program is clicked on. Pressing the key combination
Alt-Tab will cycle focus through the windows in the Tasklist. Clicking
on the title bar or any of the borders of the window will raise it.
Clicking and dragging on the title bar will move the window, and
clicking and dragging on the borders or corners of the window will
resize the window. Clicking the button on the left side of a window's
title bar will pop up a list of operations and a few options for that
window. Clicking on the other three buttons, from right to left, will
minimize, maximize, and close the window, respectively. All of this
only applies to the default setup of Sawfish on Athena; all of the
features mentioned above can be changed by the user.
Customizing Sawfish to one's individual preferences is chiefly done using the
Sawfish Configurator program, which can be accessed in several ways:
running the command 'sawfish-ui&' at the athena% prompt; clicking the
middle mouse button on the desktop background, and selecting one of
the options in the "Customize ->" submenu; or through the Gnome
Control Center, which can be run from the 'foot' menu on the panel, or
by running the command 'gnomecc&' at the athena prompt.
Sawfish's customizability is too extensive to mention here, and
unfortunately, there is no comprehensive documentation on it. On the
other hand, almost all of the features are easy to figure out just by
experimenting with them.
The main ideas behind Sawfish are to provide the user with ease of use,
configurability, customizability, and extensibility. You will find
that nearly anything can be accomplished with either the mouse or the
keyboard, and there are several ways to do it.
Sawfish is a larger program than some other window managers, but all
Athena Cluster machines and most other computers running Athena are
powerful enough that Sawfish performs just as responsively as
extremely lightweight window managers.
Some users may want to revert to the previous default windowmanager,
MWM; see the answer on "How do I get rid of this new Interface" to do
so.
Other windowmanagers may also be used on Athena; see the stock answer
on "How to use a different Windowmanager" in the "X WINDOWS SYSTEM"
section.
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