What's XTags?

XTags is a little keyboard-driven program which implements tags for X11. It's a pseudo-WM called WHM (Window Helper Manager). It's main goal is to get rid of a "real" WM by using it with dvtm on the master tag and put the secondary clients into the other tags. The basic concept was inspired by dwm, so was the configurability through editing the source code. All the functionality is accessible through the keyboard; the mouse is simply ignored. This fully meets the author's needs.

Why?

I could try to explain why i wrote XTags, discarding all other freely available window managers (many of which are very good), but it's even better to read the objective observations expressed by Leonardo Taccari in his paper XTags - Un sistema desktop ideale (only available in italian).

Screenshot

These are few ``quick shots'' made from me and Leonardo Taccari on his NetBSD box:

leot's shot 02 leot's shot 03 clamiax's shot 0x01 clamiax's shot 0x02 clamiax's shot 0x03

Download

The latest stable release of XTags is the 0.5 which you can get from the download page. Get the changelog here changelog. To browse the current code, navigate the CVS repository on SourceForge.net.

It's possible to obtain the current development branch via CVS by using the following command:

    $ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@xtags.cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/xtags co -P xtags

This will create the xtags directory containing all the sources.

Support

You can ask for help on the xtags-users mailing list. Patches, suggestions or other ways of involvement in the project will be much appreciated! There is no official IRC channel, but you can usually find the author and some XTags users on #netbsd-it@freenode.

Project status

There are few developers working on the project right now. Though, the author is actively developing XTags since he uses it for his own needs first. Improvements and extensions are being considered, but the author is quite happy with the current state of the project, so he might add new features, but might as well just keep doing code cleanups and bugfixing. Check the project page for more information.

How to help

XTags is simple enough, so not much documentation is needed. The man page is a good place to start, if you wish to learn more, but the real documentation is the source code. The config.h file is simple enough for non-developers to understand. The project needs a good programmer to help with debugging and make code improvements, add interesting new features (possibly those requested by the users on the mailing list), etc.