What do you type into .Xdefaults to enable pie menus in Motif? Surely after 30 years that would be easy, no?

It could and should have been done more than three decades ago. The criticisms I made of the X Toolkit in 1987 (33 years ago) after attending the first X-Windows conference at MIT still apply. But as it turned out, we ended up with web browsers and web servers using exactly the same extensible architecture I was advocating (now called "AJAX"), leaving X-Windows and Motif in the dustbin of history.

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/uwm.extensions.txt

On February 23, 1987, Don Hopkins wrote on xpert@athena:

>I see just the same problem with XToolKit. I would like to see the
ToolKit as a client that you would normally run on the same machine as
the server, for speed. Interactive widgets would be much more
interactive, you wouldn't have to have a copy of the whole library in
every client, and there would be just one client to configure. The big
question is how do your clients communicate with it? Are the
facilities in X11 sufficient? Or would it be a good idea to adopt some
other standard for communication between clients? At the X
conference, it was said that the X11 server should be used by clients
to rendezvous with each other, but not as a primary means of
communication. Why is that?

>Setting a standard on any kind of key or mouse bindings would be evil.
The window manager should be as transparent as possible. It solves
lots of problems for it to be able to send any event to the clients.
For example, how about function to quote an event that the window
manager would normally intercept, and send it on?

>Perhaps the window manager is the place to put the ToolKit?

> -Don

The people who wrote Xt, Athena, and Motif widgets and apps were not blind-sided by these issues, which are not "magic" or "rocket science". They just purposefully chose to dismiss and ignore them.

The X-Windows Disaster:

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39...

Recreational Bugs talk [1989] by David Rosenthal (author of the ICCCM, the Andrew Window Manager, and NeWS):

https://blog.dshr.org/2018/05/recreational-bugs.html

>"You will get a better Gorilla effect if you use as big a piece of paper as possible." -Kunihiko Kasahara, Creative Origami.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/%22xpert%22$20%22do...

On September 19, 1989, Don Hopkins wrote on xpert@athena:

>I think it's a pretty good idea to have the window manager, or some
other process running close to the server, handle all the menus.
Window managment and menu managment are separate functions, but it
would be a real performance win for the window and the menu manager to
reside in the same process. There should be options to deactivate
either type of managment, so you could run, say, a motif window
manager, and an open look menu manager at the same time. But I think
that in most cases you'd want the uniform user interface, and the
better performance, that you'd get by having both in one process.
I think it would be possible to implement something like this with the
NDE window manager in X11/NeWS. It's written in object oriented
PostScript, based on the tNt toolkit, and runs as a light weight
processes inside the NeWS server. This way, selecting from a menu
that invokes a window managment function only involves one process
(the xnews server), instead of three (the x server and the two
"outboard" managers), with all the associated overhead of paging, ipc,
and context switching.

>Here's a message on a related subject that I sent to xpert a couple
years back (before I'd heard of the ICCCM). I never did get much
response, except that one person pointed out that that was precisely
the problem that NeWS was designed to solve. ;-)

>c(-; Once were done forging the menu manager standard, how about we
do text editors, huh?)

> -Don

On November 28, 1992, Don Hopkins wrote on xpert@athena:

>piewm - Pie Window Manager

>PieWM is a window manager for the X window system that supports pie
menus, and is based on the "tvtwm" virtual window manger. The labels
of a pie menu are arranged in a circle around the cursor, and the pie
menu selection is based on the direction of cursor motion between
button clicks.

>Pie menus are fast and reliable because of Fitt's Law: each of the
items corresponds to a large slice shaped target area adjacent to the
cursor, but in a different direction. They are fast because you
don't have to move the cursor far, and the target areas are large.
They are reliable because the further away from the menu center you
move the cursor, the finer control you have over the selection.
Because the selection is based on angle, you can "mouse ahead" quickly
and reliably without looking at the screen, and the pie menus don't
even pop up if you're fast enough.

>For many tasks, pie menus are significantly faster and have lower
error rates than linear menus. PieWM integrates pie and linear
menus so you can use them interchangeably, with top level and submenus
of either type, as appropriate.

>In addition to user definable pie menus, "piewm" supports all the
features of "tvtwm" including the virtual scrolling desktop, title
bars, shaped windows, linear menus, several forms of icon management,
user defined macro functions, click-to-type and pointer-driven
keyboard focus, and user specified key and pointer button bindings.
It also features graphical pie menu labels, and comes with a default
set of window management pie menus, designed to support an efficient
gestural style of interaction. However, the pie menu windows aren't
circular, just rectangular.

>For more information about pie menus, read "The Design and
Implementation of Pie Menus," by Don Hopkins, Dr. Dobb's Journal,
Dec. 1991 user interface issue, and "A Comparative Analysis of Pie
Menu Performance," by Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser, and Ben
Shneiderman, Proc. CHI'88 conference, Washington D.C.

>PieWM is available for anonymous ftp on
</ftp.uu.net:tmp/piewm.tar.Z> and
</bongo.garnet.cs.cmu.edu:pub/piewm.tar.Z>

>Location (for anonymous FTP):

Host: bongo.garnet.cs.cmu.edu (128.2.205.150)
Dir: /pub
File: piewm.tar.Z
Size: 948239 bytes

Host: ftp.uu.net (137.39.1.9)
Dir: /tmp
File: piewm.tar.Z
Size: 948239 bytes

>Could someone "in the know" please tell me how to get this into the
appropriate X contributed software collection?

> -Don