The lightweight IceWM window manager has been updated to version 4.1, introducing a new option to control how applications influence window focus, expanding the icesh command-line utility, and fixing several configuration and graphics issues.
One main addition is a new ignoreUserTime window option, which allows users to configure IceWM to ignore the user-interaction timestamp reported by selected applications when deciding focus.
Under X11, applications provide a user-time value indicating when the user last interacted with them. Window managers may use this to decide if a newly opened window should receive focus. However, applications reporting misleading timestamps can cause unexpected focus behavior. The new option lets IceWM users disregard the timestamp for specific windows.
Apart from that, the 4.1 release adds a mousemove command to icesh, the project’s command-line tool for interacting with windows and the X11 environment, allowing the mouse pointer to be repositioned from scripts or terminal commands, expanding the utility’s usefulness for desktop automation.
Another notable change is that the Alpha setting now defaults to false. Alpha compositing could occasionally cause video performance problems, so disabling it by default should improve reliability on affected systems. Users who need transparency can still enable this setting manually in IceWM’s configuration.
The release also improves handling of malformed configuration data. IceWM can now properly handle unterminated strings in its configuration files, rather than parsing them incorrectly or producing unpredictable results.
A related fix addresses string parsing errors involving the _NET_STARTUP_ID X11 property used as part of the desktop startup notification mechanism. Plus, the developers also corrected the cleanup order for X11 graphics resources. IceWM now frees a picture before its associated pixmap, preventing an error message during resource destruction.
Finally, the release updates translations for Ukrainian, Turkish, Greek, Georgian, Danish, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.
For additional details, see the changelog. IceWM 4.1 is available now from the project’s GitHub repository as a compressed source archive. Existing users should also receive the update through their Linux distribution once package maintainers make it available.
