Codename: Paulownia

StumpWM’s codebase while stable is showing its age. Furthermore there have been recent developments in the common lisp ecosystem that stumpwm has been insulated from.

This is an attempt to modernize the stumpwm codebase while fixing some of stumpwm’s Achilles heels.

Design Goals

(From achievable to lofty)

• Test driven design. Unit tests that matter
• Re-use as much code from stumpwm as possible, don’t reinvent the wheel unless its broken
• Support for non-ascii input
• Utilize existing libraries rather than re-implementing subsets of existing functionality
• Tighter emacs integration
• Support for multiple backends (wayland, mir, X11)

Technology

• roswell for building/deploying
• prove for unit testing
• travis-ci for cloud CI testing
• qtools for gui components
• various packages carved out of the stumpwm codebase and re-packaged for quicklisp distribution

Why Paulownia?

It seems like a strange name, stumpwm reminds me of a tree stump, the idea behind this is to burn stumpwm to the ground and grow it back up stronger and better than before. If you google phoenix tree, the top hit is the wiki page describing the genus Paulownia. The wiki page actually draws a lot of analogies to the goals of this project, so the name was chosen.