After looking at PLWM — the Pointless Window Manager — last
week, Brian Proffitt catches up with Peter Liljenberg, one of the
primary developers of PLWM (along with Morgan Eklöf).
Liljenberg admits that the Python-based PLWM isn’t actually so
pointless and has great potential as a hands-on window manager for
disabled users and set-top systems:
‘A little more than two years ago we were spending a night
conversing, as we usually do,’ Liljenberg explained. ‘Somehow two
ideas collided, which probably had matured for some time. The name
‘Pointless Window Manager’ also was invented, with a significant
incentive to actually implement the ideas.'”
“The first idea in the collision was the developers’ desire to
control the desktop solely from the keyboard.”
“It was at this point the second idea in the late-night
brainstorming session began to emerge. While Liljenberg and
Eklöf knew they could put something together that would work
using conventional techniques, they thought it would be rather
redundant to create another configuration file language. Why not
use a scripting language like Python?”