Nearly a month after the previous 3.8.2 release, IceWM, a lightweight window manager for X Window System, favored for its minimal resource usage and high configurability, has released its latest version, 3.9.
One of the bigger highlights in this release is cursor handling. If a theme doesn’t define its own cursor, IceWM will now fall back to the system’s Xcursor theme. Additionally, support for themed cursors was added to gdk-pixbuf without requiring libXpm, and Xcursor files are now supported as an alternative to the older XPM format.
The icesh tool, a command-line utility that lets you send commands to the window manager and manage windows directly from the shell or scripts, also gains a new -kovered filter, which makes it possible to test if a client window is covered.
Several fixes landed, too: failures on “/proc/net/dev” reads are now avoided after the first error, the “_NET_CLIENT_LIST_STACKING” property is kept properly up-to-date, red and blue color handling was corrected in icesh for icon operations, and title truncation now respects UTF-8 codepoint boundaries.
As for other changes, when a cursor X/Y-hotspot is missing in an XPM file, IceWM will now attempt a smart guess rather than failing outright. Lastly, language updates round out the release, with refreshed translations for Spanish, Hungarian, and Brazilian Portuguese.
For packagers, libXcursor is now a requirement, while the old dependency on libXpm has been dropped. For more information, see the changelog.
It’s wild (and cool) that the venerable icewm is still seeing sustained progress