Pekwm on pekdon

pekwm theme scaling

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 20:12:25 +0100

Got the question if pekwm supported HiDPI display, or theme scaling more specifically, and as it did not I got excited about it and started implementing theme scaling for pekwm and its shipped tools.

A single scaling setting in the Screen section controls the scaling:

Screen {
    Scale = "2.0"
}

If the factor is an integer, pixels are scaled to 4, 9, 16 etc pixels without any scaling artifacts. It is possible to specify 1.5 but scaling result will not be as clean.

pekwm daytime

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 19:27:11 +0100

Most (desktop) environments these days have support for both a light and dark mode and during the winter semester the changes in ambient lighting is quite dramatic during the day and so this is something I’ve been wanting to have in pekwm not having to do it manually.

During the summer semester, there’s virtually no need for me as it is mostly bright outside during the hours I’m awake.

Anyway, pekwm has gotten a new optional component, pekwm_sys that is configured in the new Sys section of the main config file.

pekwm-0.3.1 released

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 17:50:41 +0100

First maintenance release in the new 0.3.X series of pekwm releases.

Closed issues

pekwm

#170, Reduce flickering when placing new windows.
#175, GotoItem N now skips separators and non-visible items.
#163, ButtonRelase actions on the Client working again.
#161, GotoItem N regression caused it to behave as NextItem.
Use X double buffer extension in pekwm_panel and pekwm_dialog to avoid flickering on redraws.
X11 font name detection would fail if any font options was specified, such as alignment.

pekwm_panel

Setup PEKWM_CONFIG_PATH and PEKWM_CONFIG_FILE in the environment of pekwm_panel as it is used for icon loading, fixes icon loading issues when pekwm_panel started before pekwm.
Update ClientList on panel start, fixes blank client list until window focus is changed.
Fix text rendering after receiving XRANDR events when using Pango Cairo fonts.

pekwm release history

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 20:18:39 +0100

pekwm-0.3.0 has been released and includes quite a bit of changes compared to the previous pekwm-0.2.1 not to speak of whats still in some distributions that being pekwm-0.1.18.

These releases got me thinking about the impact the release frequency has on software.

First, lets start of with the not so impressive pekwm release history:

0.3.0, 2022-01, 13 month since 0.2.1.
0.2.1, 2021-12, 1 month since 0.2.0.
0.2.0, 2021-10, 11 months since 0.1.18.
0.1.18, 2020-11, 90 months since 0.1.17.
0.1.17, 2013-05, 6 months since 0.1.16.
0.1.16, 2012-11, 3 months since 0.1.15.
0.1.15, 2012-08, 8 months since 0.1.14.
0.1.14, 2011-12, 6 months since 0.1.13.
0.1.13, 2011-06, 14 months since 0.1.12.
0.1.12, 2010-03, 10 months since 0.1.11.
0.1.11, 2009-05, 4 months since 0.1.10.
0.1.10, 2009-01, 1 month since 0.1.9.
0.1.9, 2008-12, 2 months since 0.1.8.
0.1.8, 2008-10, 2 months since 0.1.7.
0.1.7, 2008-08, 15 months since 0.1.6.
0.1.6, 2007-05, 13 months since 0.1.5.
0.1.5, 2006-04, 2 months since 0.1.4.
0.1.4, 2006-02, 32 months since 0.1.3.
0.1.3, 2003-06, 8 months since 0.1.2.
0.1.2, 2002-10, 4 days since 0.1.1.
0.1.1, 2002-10, second pekwm release.

As the above list shows, the release frequency have been quite irregular to say the least and having releases drag behind have caused a lot of users having to run the development version for a smooth experience.

pekwm and pywal

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 10:21:19 +0100

A friend of mine asked me if it was possible to use pywal together with pekwm a while back.

pywal is a tool that generates a color scheme from the dominant colors in an image. Amongst other things, the color scheme is set in Xresources.

Me, being unaware of what pywal was at that time, looked into it and figured a good way of supporting it would be to allow for pekwm to read color information from Xresources.

Sun Blade 1500 on Solaris 10

Sun, 19 Dec 2021 08:32:30 +0000

A while back I was fortunate enough to be given a Sun Blade 1500 from a long time pekwm user.

It is, by todays standards, old and slow making it perfect for experiencing how pekwm actually performs. Also, running Solaris 10, being big endian and using Xsun instead of a current Xorg server makes it perfect to find odd issues.

I had a few issues with getting machine up and running, the PSU and harddrive experienced some post storage issues. The PSU magically got back to life after trying another PSU out, harddrive got replaced. When that was all sorted out trying pekwm out to see if there was any issues.

pekwm_panel in the works!

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 21:37:40 +0100

After rebooting the pekwm development, the activity from users on Github page has increased and in one of the recent issues a comment was added noting that it was hard to know iconified windows exist.

The seasoned users know of the Icon menu, however, as a new pekwm user it is less than obvious how one should know the iconfied windows exist. As it was noted this was not a problem in other environments where a panel is available listing all clients I decided to create a pekwm_panel.

0.2.0 theme updates

Tue, 09 Feb 2021 21:40:39 +0100

pekwm-0.2.0 will bring a couple of noticeable improvements to the theme system including:

Backgrounds
ColorMaps
Variants

This post will describe what these features do and how to use them.

Backgrounds

It is now possible to set the background with the theme using the new Background section in the theme file. All pekwm textures are supported including the new LinesVert and LinesHorz textures. For a full list of textures, see the themes documentation. Image textures are loaded from the backgrounds folder within the theme directory.

pekwm_theme utility

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 18:47:28 +0100

As part of getting pekwm back on track the infrastructure for a theme index has started to take shape with the following components:

pekwm-theme-index, a repository on GitHub with a collection of theme files containing meta-data about themes.
pekwm-theme-page, the page and screenshot generator for https://www.pekwm.se/themes/ based on the data from pekwm-theme-index.
pekwm_theme, shell script included with pekwm for managing user themes.

This post focus on the last component in the list above, the user command for managing themes.

pekwm development reboot

Sun, 31 Jan 2021 12:33:11 +0100

The pekwm development has been non-existent the last couple of years and before that it has been very slow for many years. Many reasons behind this including but not limited to not using a Linux machine at work, life has been busy and a lack of interest.

My interest has come back, I’ve gotten myself an “old” Lenovo T440S running OpenBSD at home and started working on pekwm again.

To be able to spend more time on actual development and not maintain infrastructure and what-not there has been some changes: