ProWesS introduction

To explain a bit more what ProWesS is, here is an excerpt from an article about ProWesS which appeared in IQLR (a QL magazine, which is now replaced by QL Today).

ProWesS is built to be highly configurable and screen independent. Screen independence is achieved by using PROforma (with pixel optimizations). This means that ProWesS is independent of screen resolution and colours. No matter what your screen size is, you specify how big something is in PROforma coordinates - so it will always be the same size on screen, whether its 10 pixels on a low or 50 pixels on a high resolution screen. In fact, ProWesS is even colour independent. Colours are specified as RGB colours, which are always approximated as best possible.

Consistency and configurability are also strong points of ProWesS. Each ProWesS window can always be moved and scaled by indicating the "scale border". This is a border around the window, which is directly visible and has a special pointer. A "hit" (space or left mouse button) on this border allows you to move the window. When you "do" ("enter" or right mouse button) on this border, you can scale the window. Scaling is always done by pulling the corner to increase or decrease the size. The opposite corner stays at the same position. During move and scale actions you can get a preview of the window in the new position and or size. Of course you can also configure whether you want this preview, and also the size and colour of the scaleborder.

The consistency is also strengthened because configuring ProWesS affects all the windows. The appearance of the whole system is controlled by a central configuration file. There is no need anymore to configure the colourways of each application individually. You just have to change the configuration of ProWesS and all windows will automatically conform to it. The configuration is also a lot more flexible. You can for example configure the size of title items to be larger than other items, or use a different font.

A ProWesS window is built from objects of a certain type. Each type can be configured individually (in the centralized configuration file, as mentioned before). The look and feel can even be modified much more. The code for each type is loaded separately and thus can be replaced by other code (newer, changed) for a type with the same name and functionality, but different look and/or behaviour. This allows each user to make his system look the way (s)he wants. For instance a title is such an object, but also the border around a loose item is an object. So you could replace the border by a completely different type, for example to have rounded corners. Also the function to edit a line of text is a separate type, and can be altered.

Of course the possibility that the size of all items in the window can be increased, has the possible effect that the window no longer fits on the screen. ProWesS will fix this by making the window as large as possible, and the user can scroll the visible part of the window by pressing <control shift alt cursor key>.

Although ProWesS is a new window manager, it does not interfere with the Qjump "wman" window manager. It is quite possible to run applications which use wman and ProWesS together. This assures that you can still use all your "old" programs, and run ProWesS and newer applications at the same time. To demonstrate this we include a screen with some ProWesS jobs on it. It still contains the button frame with Qpac2 software etc. It also contains a sleeping ProWesS client.