> I have never played with GNUStep. By the time I actually started real work as a professional software person (2011) it was already kind of considered a joke, so I never bothered learning how to use it.
I dunno if it was a joke or not, but I can confirm that I used Windowmaker as my daily driver from around 2004-ish to 2019-ish.[1]
The only reason I switched, and did not switch back, is due wanting my virtual desktops to be arranged in a 3x3 grid, and Windowmaker did not have that, nor was it on any roadmap.
The thing I miss about my Windowmaker days is how focused it let me be - the entire screen was devoted to a window (or multiple windows); nothing crying out for attention in some bar at the bottom of the screen.
Should I get a few free moments in the near future, I'm tempted to actually add that feature in.
All the other things (taskbar, wifi/sound/etc controls in the taskbar) I can either do without (i.e. I don't need it if I have a decent launcher that is bound to a shortcut), or I can use an existing dockapp.
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[1] Here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W_4fH_ccQE
You might like something like i3 (if using X) or Sway (if using Wayland), or another tiling manager like Xmonad.
They are extremely minimal and really get out of your way. I had to write my own service to power the info on the Sway bar [1] because the entire thing is so minimal.
For me, I have title bars in windows disabled, and the gap between different windows is literally 1 pixel.
[1] First version: https://github.com/tombert/swanbar Rust rewrite: https://github.com/tombert/rs-swanbar
WindowMaker certainly was quite popular for a while, probably also because it can be used without GNUstep, just as a plain X11 window manager.
Actually, it has its own toolkit named WINGs. Which stands for WINGs is not GNUstep ;)
https://www.windowmaker.org/docs/wings.html