perlwm is a window manager written entirely in perl. Why would you want such a thing? Why would a perl one be worth having? Who knows – it seemed like a good idea at the time; I was getting fed up with having to switch between workspaces to get stuff done on my laptop and I had some vague ideas about how a better window manager might help me. I set off to find the perfect window manager, but couldn’t really find one which solved all my problems.
So, rather than do the right thing and contribute to an existing window manager, I decided to write my own – in perl. All the mature window managers looked pretty tricky to make any major changes – especially changes in behavior. Also, I thought that perl would be good at some of the configuration stuff I wanted, and I was hacking a lot of perl recently and doing wonderful things in just a few lines.
There had been talk of perl window managers before, but I couldn’t find one which had got as far as actually managing any windows. Not really knowing where to start, I stumbled across X 728 :: Protocol on CPAN. That and the chapter on window management in one of the X books got me going. Within a couple of hours, I was drawing my own frames.
Since other people had mentioned the idea before, I thought that making it all public would in some way repay my debt to society and so this project (kindly hosted for free by SourceForge was started.
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