Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

It's such an underrated advantage of open source operating systems that if you like some bit of software, you'll likely be able to use it for decades to come. Even a core bit of software like a window manager. I grew to hate how you need to conform to someone's whim at Apple or Microsoft, or else you get locked out of new features.

This is a flash from an almost forgotten past. I'm happy people are still using and even improving Enlightenment.

I used to run Enlightenment in the late nineties and early 2000s, first by itself, then with Gnome bar. At some point Gnome turned hostile on power users and I switched to KDE, leaving also Enlightenment behind, as well as any extensive customization of my desktop. At that time, the ubiquitous themes.org also got in disarray, and I feel it was a bit an end of an era of design and theming experiments on the early Linux (and *BSD) desktop.

> Sadly, the hang was deterministic:

Huh, someone's in it for the thrill of the hunt, I see...

The amount of abuse I hurled at Carsten Haitzler (Raster) during our time at VA Linux (where he worked on E as well as other stuff) was a complete sitcom unto itself; at one point he debated making a "zeruch insult generator" just to streamline the verbal abuse process.

I loved using the environment but would regularly harangue him for being glib on resource usage. It really was otherwise very ahead of the curve.

Fun post! Very happy to see a 20-something year old find and fix bugs in an X11 wm from before they were born. Gives me hope.

There was some kind of editing snafu though, the loop header in the big (first) code block reads:

    for (i = 0; i < 10; i++, nuke_count++)

    for (;;)

Oh, people are still using Enlightenment.

My last time I used it was still in the 1990's, before I settled into Afterstep and soon afterwards Windowmaker.

In what concerns my use of GNU/Linux, it was CDE on others.

Apparently nothing big came out of Enlightenment and Tizen.

Funnily, E16 was considered a rather eye candy but heavy WM/environment back in the i486 / early pentium days, now it is considered lightweight!

I am still waiting for e17. I stuck to e16 for a long time until ubuntu got a thing which was much more convenient than gentoo.

I had the classic setup with the apache helicopter on the background and virtual desktops with preview. On MacOS however.

To this day i am still using a single screen, with virtual desktops ordered the same way.

> It’s themable, hackable, lightweight

Certainly wasn't considered lightweight back then :-)

I never saw the appeal of Enlightenment, but a very nice write-up regardless.

I love Enlightenment still, even the new ones. The most important component of it to me is Terminology. What a gorgeous and functional Terminal emulator.

https://www.enlightenment.org/ Seems down at the moment.

Coincidence, or collateral hug?

"Re-attaching repeatedly showed the program was not deadlocked."

Why re-attaching and not just resume then ctrl+c ? Is this some kind of clever hack I dont know about.

Whenever I try something else, I always seem to keep going back to E16. Back in the day, it worked well in Gnome 2.x; these days I tend to use it in XFCE, but it feels a bit less integrated.

Still the best window manager ever made. Nothing has beaten it to date.

E16 was the hook that caught me and landed me, flopping and writhing, on the decks of Linux - I saw a black and white printout of someone’s desktop, and immediately set about figuring out how to get this unbelievable coolness working on my laptop. By the time I was done I was muttering modelines in my sleep, and had already committed my first patches to a kernel module.

I wonder how many other teenagers got catfished into becoming software devs and sysadmins by the siren song of rasterman.

I used that same theme back in 2003. Makes me want to reinstall E16

Enlightenment is pretty cool. Some years ago though I realised that I just want the computer to be a fast and simple workstation at all times. That's when I kind of stopped using KDE (and GNOME3 but I did not use it to begin with, it always felt like an opinionated smartphone-UI pushed onto the desktop).

I think only few people use Enlightenment, so the resources to fix bugs must also be small.

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