SawFish vs. Enlightenment

[Kevin Buettner]

Until recently, I was running enlightenment 0.16 on my RH 6.0 box and was
fairly happy with it.  There were a few annoying bugs and it seemed kind of
slow at times, but it was my hope that these problems would get ironed out
in later releases.  (And they still may be.)

A few weeks ago, I upgraded my RH 6.0 boxes to RH 6.2.  After doing this,
I noticed that enlightenment had gotten extremely slow, taking on the
order of about a second at times to switch viewport areas.

Last week, I noticed that Gnome 1.2 was out.  I installed the Helix Code
release and noticed that it came with a window manager called SawFish.
I'd read about the window manager in the past, but never bothered trying
it since it was partially implemented in a variant of lisp and I suspected
that it would be slow.

It's actually quite good.  For me, it's faster than enlightenment, and
is lacking some of enlightenment's bugs that were fairly annoying
to me.  (When moving a window between viewports, enlightenment would
get confused about where the window actually was and your cursor would
either lead or trail the location of the actual window.)  I've only
noticed one bug in SawFish so far and that I worked around by disabling
the animation mode feature.  (If you want to see the bug, make the
default window animation mode "solid" and then iconify a window.)

One of the things that I really, really liked about enlightenment was
its pager.  I was able to use the pager to move windows around by
dragging the small representations of my application's windows from
one viewport to another.  (BTW, this is something that fvwm, olvm, and
other window managers were able to do over ten years ago.)  But, this
is something that the Gnome pager was unable to do...  until now that
is.  Gnome 1.2 has a better pager whereby you can use the middle mouse
button to move windows around.  It still lacks some of the features of
the enlightenment pager, but I suspect that some of those extra
features in the enlightenment pager were making the whole thing slow.

Anyway, I recommend SawFish for those of you who like enlightenment,
but are fed up with some of its bugs and/or slowness.  (Upgrading
to Gnome 1.2 is also recommended.)

Kevin