[plug] RE: windows

Bevan Broun bevanb at ee.uwa.edu.au
Fri Jan 15 10:27:39 WST 1999


on Fri, Jan 15, 1999 at 12:58:00PM +1100, Grant Byers <bycam at stealth.com.au> wrote:
> Rob,
> 
> Just reading your message regarding the Desktop and your proposed use of
> Star Office..
> 
> Just a word of warning.. Star Office is nice, but incredibly slow and very
> resource hungry..
> Mind you, I only run 16M ram, but I have spoken to others who have tried
> it on 64M + and they say it's still basically unusable for the amount of
> resources it swallows..

Agreed - I have 40MB ram on a 200MHz pentium, star office (4.0) is
usable but has some very annoying features (file->new => a long wait).
Im using word perfect for word processing. I wonder if Corel could add
"vi style" editing to word perfect ...

> As for Desktops, I'm in agreement with Nathan.. WindowMaker is the best I

Nice to know that Im not alone :-)

> have tried.. KDE hogs resources.. Mainly kdm and kfm.. I found I could run
> WindowMaker and kde apps together nicely and it is a hell of alot faster..
> 
> Only thing to get used to is the 'chunky' 64x64 Dock icons, but it is
> possible to reduce their size, and under a resolution of 800x600 upwards,
> it isn't so bad..

WindowMaker is *very* configurable, which I like. In AfterStep-1.4 I
couldn't suffiently control the order of the items on the menu.

My favorite little configuration for WM being to #define ARROWLESS_KBD
in src/wconfig.h which gives me vi style menu movements which I love.
(arrow keys still work.) With WindowMaker I hardly have to touch the
mouse ever which must be a good thing.

BB
-- 
Bevan Broun                                           ph (08) 9380 1587
Computer Systems Officer                             fax (08) 9380 1065
Dept. Electrical and Electronic Engineering      
University of Western Australia                                 rm. G70


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