In the last month there has been a lot of changes in repository. First of all, maybe the most interesting change is that edewm (window manager) was replaced with pekwm, making EDE now fully eFLTK free! This is the major step we headed to in last few years when decided to abandon eFLTK and fully focus on stable (and more maintable) FLTK 1.x.

I chose pekwm simply because it depends only on C++ compiler and X11 libs. I used it (and still using it) heavily with other EDE parts and it works without any major problems. Also, quite important thing for window manager was to have good window manager specification support, so users can replace them without any hassle.

Thanks to ChristTrekker suggestion I played with FLTK based awflwm, but it is still quite behind EDE needs.

Also, important news is how panel (ede-panel) got system tray support (implementing almost full system tray specification, excluding messaging part). This removed one huge limitation for current EDE usage, as more and more applications (and daemons) store own status in tray. Here is image with some apps running on Fedora 15:


There could be some issues I missed, but this thing is working and I'm using it daily (with skype and pidgin of course :)).

ede-launch got some important addition in form of support for preferred applications. This introduced new tool, called ede-preferred-applications from where user can select preferred web browser or terminal. I'm sure you already seen it in form of exo-preferred-applications from Xfce or similar tool from GNOME.

Basically, with this you will be able to run preselected terminal or browser, or simply leave ede-launch to guess your input and deduce what to run.

ede-launch can now directly run .desktop files too, which will simplify some code in ede-desktop component.

So to summarize, you can do this:

ede-launch http://www.google.com  # run selected browser
ede-launch [email protected] # run selected mail client
ede-launch --launch terminal ls -la /  # list directory in preferred terminal

As ede-launch is used to start almost everything, these features will become quite handy.

What are the major things left to be done before release? There is a small issue with long long support on FreeBSD's Xorg distro (EDE is compiled with -pedantic support yielding error reports when long long is detected, as it is not supported by C++ standard) and iconv inside pekwm (also on FreeBSD) that needs to be resolved. Also, I would like to review translation support and add intltool for easier string extraction from files that are not source code (conf and .desktop files, theme sources and such).