I was drafting support for showing “application icons” in my window manager, i.e. the Firefox icon in the titlebar:

https://movq.de/v/0034cc1384/s.png

Then I realized: Wait a minute, lots of applications don’t set an icon? And lots of other window managers don’t show these icons, either? Openbox, pekwm, Xfce, fvwm, no icons.

Looks like macOS doesn’t show them, either?!

Has this grown out of fashion? Is this purely a Windows / OS/2 thing?

(#boiotxq) @movq@www.uninformativ.de I haven’t used KDE or GNOME for ages, but I’m sure KDE at least used to show application icons in the title bars. They proabably still do. But then, one could argue that KDE is mimicking Windows. I never thought like that, I always found KDE way superior, because I was able to configure it like a madman.

In i3, I don’t have any application icons. I remember missing them at the beginning. But I don’t even have the classical minimize, maximize and close buttons in the title bar either. Just the title. Being mostly keyboard driven and a tiling window manager, these buttons are not super useful, anyway.

(#boiotxq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org True, at least old versions of KDE had icons:

https://movq.de/v/0e4af6fea1/s.png

GNOME, on the other hand, didn’t, at least to my old screenshots from 2007:

https://www.uninformativ.de/desktop/2007%2D05%2D25%2D%2Dgnome2%2Dlaptop.png

I switched to Linux in 2007 and no window manager I used since then had icons, apparently. Crazy. An icon-less existence for 18 years. (But yeah, everything is keyboard-driven here as well and there are no buttons here, either.)

Anyway, my draft is making progress:

https://movq.de/v/5b7767f245/s.png

I do like this look. 😊

(#boiotxq) @movq@www.uninformativ.de According to this screenshot, KDE still shows good old application icons: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/KDE_Plasma_5.21_Breeze_Twilight_screenshot.png

And GNOME used to have them, too: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Gnome-2-22_%284%29.png

I like the looks of your window manager. That’s using Wayland, right? The only thing on this screenshot to critique is all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1 At least the file browser. 8-)

This drives me nuts when my workmates share their screens. I really don’t get it how people can work like that. You can’t even read the whole line in the IDE or log viewer with all the expanded side bars. And then there’s 200 pixels on the left and another 300 pixels on the right where the desktop wallpaper shows. Gnaa! There’s the other extreme end when somebody shares their ultra wide screen and I just have a “regularish” 16:10 monitor and don’t see shit, because it’s resized way too tiny to fit my width. Good times. :-D

Sorry for going off on a tangent here. :-) Back to your WM: It has the right mix of being subtle and still similar to motif. Probably close to the older Windowses. My memory doesn’t serve me well, but I think they actually got it fairly good in my opinion. Your purple active window title looks killer. It just fits so well. This brown one (https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-07-22/0/leafpads.png) gives me also classic vibes. Awww. We ran some similar brownish color scheme (don’t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98 for some time on the family computer. I remember other people visting us not liking these colors. :-D

(#boiotxq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, huh, maybe it was just my GNOME 2 themes back then that didn’t show the icon. 🤔

I like the looks of your window manager. That’s using Wayland, right?

Oh, no. It’s still X11. All my recent Wayland comments resulted from me trying to switch, but I think it’s still too early. Being unable to use QEMU (because it can’t capture the mouse pointer) is a pretty big blocker for me. This is completely broken, it just happens to be unnoticeable with modern guest OSes, so it’s probably not a priority for devs.

(Not to mention that I would have to fork and substantially extend dwl in order to “replicate” my X11 WM. And then, after having done that, I’d have to follow upstream Wayland development, for which I don’t have the resources. Things would need to slow down before I can do that.)

all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1

Heh. I’ve been using tiling WMs for ~15 years now, so it’s actually kind of refreshing to see something different for a change. 😅

Probably close to the older Windowses.

That particular theme is a ripoff of OS/2 Warp 3: https://movq.de/v/6c2a948882/s.png 😅

We ran some similar brownish color scheme (don’t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98

Oh god. Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of those, either. 🥴

(#boiotxq) @movq@www.uninformativ.de Ah, okay! That’s why it’s in such an advanced state. :-)

Nice, I never came in contact with OS/2.

(#boiotxq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org “Advanced”, well, probably more “mature”. There aren’t a ton of crazy features and that icon thing is the largest code addition in the last 10 years. %)

Speaking of OS/2 … I just realized that Windows 3.x didn’t have icons, either. If I’m not mistaken, this only got added in Windows 95. In other words, OS/2 had this feature before Windows did, because at least OS/2 2.1 from 1993 had icons. Who would have thunk.

(Now I kind of want to know which system really introduced this feature.)