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The MGR Window System HOWTO
Vincent Broman
Draft, 16 November 1994
1. This HOWTO
Copyright Vincent Broman 1994.
Permission granted to make and distribute
verbatim (unaltered) copies for any purpose.
1.1. Archiving
This HOWTO is temporarily archived in ftp://bugs.nosc.mil/pub/Mgr/MGR-
HOWTO, and more permanently in
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/MGR-HOWTO. A copy will
appear in ftp://archimedes.nosc.mil/pub/Mgr/MGR-HOWTO since bugs is
disappearing in late 1994. In the same directories may appear
alternate formats like MGR-HOWTO.sgml or MGR-HOWTO.txt.
1.2. Credit for the HOWTO
While Vincent Broman first put together this HOWTO, much of the
information and text was obtained from FAQs, READMEs, etc. written by
Stephen Uhler, Michael Haardt, and other public-spirited net-persons.
Email corrections and suggested changes to broman@nosc.mil.
Uhler was the main architect of MGR -- see the Credit section below.
2. What is the MGR window system?
2.1. Function
MGR (ManaGeR) is a graphical window system. The MGR server provides a
builtin window manager and windowed graphics terminal emulation on
color and monochrome bitmap displays. MGR is controlled by mousing
pop-up menus, by keyboard interaction, and by escape sequences written
on pseudo-terminals by client software.
MGR provides each client window with: termcap-style terminal control
functions, graphics primitives such as line and circle drawing;
facilities for manipulating bitmaps, fonts, icons, and pop-up menus;
commands to reshape and position windows; and a message passing
facility enabling client programs to rendezvous and exchange messages.
Client programs may ask to be informed when a change in the window
system occurs, such as a reshaped window, a pushed mouse button, or a
message sent from another client program. These changes are called
events. MGR notifies a client program of an event by sending it an
ASCII character string in a format specified by the client program.
Existing applications can be integrated into the windowing environment
without modification by having MGR imitate keystrokes in response to
user defined menu selections or other events.
2.2. Requirements
MGR currently runs on Linux, Sun 3/4 workstations with SunOS, and
Coherent. Various older versions of MGR run on the Macintosh, Atari
ST MiNT, Xenix, 386-Minix, DEC 3100, and the 3b1 Unix-pc. Many small,
industrial, real-time systems under OS9 or Lynx in Europe use Mgr for
their user interface. The programming interface is implemented in C
and in ELisp, although supporting clients written in other languages
is quite easy.
Running MGR requires much less in resources than X, or even gcc. It
does not have the user-base, software repertory, or high-level
libraries of X or MS-Windows, say, but it is quite elegant and
approachable.
It has been said that MGR is to X as Unix was to Multics.
2.3. How do MGR, X11 and 8.5 compare?
MGR consists of a server with builtin window manager and terminal
emulator, and clients which run in this terminal emulator and use it
to communicate with the server. No resource multiplexing is done.
X11 consists of a server and clients, which usually connect to the
server using a socket. All user visible things like terminal
emulators, window managers etc are done using clients. No resource
multiplexing is done.
8.5, the Plan 9 window system, is a resource multiplexer, as each
process running in a window can access /dev/bitblt, /dev/mouse and
/dev/kbd in its own namespace. These are multiplexed to the
/dev/bitblit, /dev/mouse and /dev/kbd in the namespace of 8.5. This
approach allows one to run 8.5 in an 8.5 window, a very clean design.
8.5 further has an integrated window manager and terminal emulator.
3. Installing MGR
The latest source distribution can be FTPed from the directories
ftp://bugs.nosc.mil/pub/Mgr/65 and
ftp://archimedes.nosc.mil/pub/Mgr/65. One used to be able to find
older MGR sources at ftp://ftp.thp.uni-koeln.de/pub/linux/mgr, or
alternatively on ftp://134.95.80.1/pub/thp/linux/mgr, but these may be
gone. Even older versions of this distribution from Haardt can be
found on tsx-11.mit.edu and elsewhere. Pre-Linux versions of MGR from
Uhler and others can be found at ftp://bellcore.com/pub/mgr, although
no one seems to maintain things there. MGR has been through a lot of
versions and releases, but the current *Linux* version number is 0.65.
This version number ought to arrive at 1.0 when stable 256-color VGA
code for Linux appears. RCS version numbers have increased from
Bellcore's 4.3 up to our 4.12 now.
Required tools to build this distribution of MGR are m4 (GNU, or
perhaps another supporting the -D option), make (GNU, or perhaps
another supporting include) and *roff for the docs. Also sh, awk, and
POSIX install. Binary distributions have not been assembled yet, so
you need an ANSI C compiler environment, e.g. gcc.
A Linux installation requires Linux 0.99.10 or better, an HGC, EGA,
VGA, or SVGA graphics card, and a mouse. Mouses supported are: serial
Microsoft mouse, serial MouseSystems 3 and 5 byte mouse, serial
MMSeries mouse, serial Logitech mouse, PS/2 mouse, or a bus mouse.
The VGA 640x480 monochrome graphics mode is supported out of the box,
as is 640x350 and 640x200. To run 800x600, or other modes that your
BIOS can initialize and which do not require bank-switching, you need
to run a small program (supplied as src/vgamisc/regs.exe) under DOS to
read the VGA registers and write a header file which you place in the
directory src/libbitblit/linux, so that it can be included by the
vga.c file there. Some VGA cards can use 128k windows, and these can
run higher monochrome resolutions.
The Linux-colorport code also runs in the standard 320x200x256 color
VGA mode without difficulty, because no bank switching is required.
Non-fast, but simple, bank-switching code has been added in version
0.65, and it works with a Tseng ET4000 card in 640x480x256 and
800x600x256 modes. The S3 code does not work in super VGA
resolutions, yet. Supporting new super VGA cards requires writing one
function to switch banks and making sure that the desired screen mode
can be initialized from a register dump, possibly with hand-tweaking.
The Linux color servers generally mangle the screen fonts,
necessitating use of restorefont as in runx.
Suns with SunOS 4.1.2 and bwtwo, cgthree, or cgsix frame buffers are
supported. Coherent installations should refer to the README.Coh file
in the source distribution. Porting the latest-and-greatest MGR to
another POSIX-like system which provides select() and pty's and direct
access to a bitmapped frame-buffer ought to be straightforward, just
implementing the libbitblit library based on the sunmono or colorport
code, say.
If you want to install everything, you need 5 MB disk space for
binaries, fonts, manual pages etc. The sources are about 2 MB, plus
object files during compilation.
Normally, /usr/mgr should be either the directory or a link to the
directory where you install MGR stuff for runtime use. Typing
chdir /usr/mgr; gunzip < whereveryouputit/mgrusr.tgz | tar xvf -
and optionally
chdir /usr/mgr; gunzip < wherever/morefonts.tgz | tar xvf -
will unpack these. The source can be put anywhere, e.g. typing
chdir /usr/src/local/mgr; gunzip < wherever/mgrsrc.tgz | tar xvf -
to unpack the sources from bugs.nosc.mil.
The source tree can be compiled from one top-level Makefile which
invokes lower-level Makefiles, all of which "include" a "Configfile"
at the top level. The Configfile is created by an interactive sh
script named Configure, which runs m4 on a Configfile.m4. So you do
something like this:
chdir /usr/src/local/mgr
sh ./Configure
make first
make depend
make install
make clean
It might be wise, before running make, to eyeball the Configfile
generated by the Configure script, checking that it looks reasonable.
(At least one m4 poops out (Sun /usr/bin/m4), creating a very short
Configfile. If this happens, try editing a copy of Configfile.sun or
Configfile.lx) Several flags in MGRFLAGS can be added/omitted to
change some optional features in the server, viz:
-DWHO
muck utmp file so "who" works
-DVI
code for clicking the mouse in vi moving the cursor
-DDEBUG
enable debugging output selectable with -d options.
-DFASTMOUSE
XOR the mouse track
-DBUCKEY
for hot-key server commands without mousing
-DPRIORITY
for priority window scheduling instead of round-robin; the
active window gets higher priority
-DCUT
for cut/paste between windows and a global snarf buffer
-DALIGN
forces window alignment for fast scrolling (monochr)
-DKILL
kills windows upon tty i/o errors
-DSHRINK
use only some of the screen ($MGRSIZE in environment)
-DNOSTACK
don't permit event stacking
-DBELL
really ring the bell
-DKBD
read mgr input from the sun kbd, instead of stdin. This permits
redirection of console msgs to a window.
-DFRACCHAR
fractional character movement for proportional fonts
-DXMENU
extended menu stuff (experimental)
-DMOVIE
movie making extension which logs all operations to a file for
later replay -- not quite working under Linux
-DEMUMIDMSBUT
Emulate a missing middle mouse button by chording
Not all combinations of these options work on all systems.
The BITBLITFLAGS macro should contain -DBANKED if you're trying out
the super VGA color.
If a make complains about the lack of a default_font.h or an
icon_server.h in the directory src/mgr, it means that you forgot to do
this
make depend
recently enough. C code for the static variables containing icons and
fonts is generated by a translator from icon and font files.
Not all the clients are compiled and installed by the Makefiles.
Clients found under src/clients having capitalized names or not
compiled by the supplied Makefiles may have problems compiling and/or
running, but they may be interesting to hack on. Most of the screen
drivers found under the libbitblit directory are of mainly
archeological interest. Grave robbing can be profitable.
At some point check that your /etc/termcap and/or terminfo file
contain entries for MGR terminals such as found in the misc directory.
If all your software checks $TERMCAP in the environment, this is not
needed, as long as you run set_termcap in each window.
MGR works better if run setuid root, because it wants to chown ptys
and write in the utmp file. This helps the ify iconifier client work
better and the event passing mechanism be more secure. On Linux, root
permissions are required in order to do in/out on the screen device.
Otherwise, you decide whether to trust it.
In versions around 0.62 there are troubles on the Sun with using the
csh as the default shell. Programs seem to run in a different process
group than the foreground process group of the window's pty. There is
no trouble with bash, sh, or rc. Ideas why?
4. Running MGR
The only file required in an MGR installation is the server itself.
That would give you terminal emulator windows with shells running in
them, but no nice clocks, extra fonts, fancy graphics, etc. Depending
on options, a monochrome server needs about 200K of RAM plus dynamic
space for windows, bitmaps, etc.
If /usr/mgr/bin is in your PATH, then just type "mgr" to start up.
After enjoying the animated startup screen, press any key. When the
hatched background and mouse pointer appear, hold down the left mouse
button, highlight the "new window" menu item, and release the button.
Then drag the mouse from corner to corner where you want a window to
appear. The window will have your default shell running in it. Hold
down the left mouse button over an existing window to see another menu
for doing things to that window. The menu you saw that pops-up over
the empty background includes the quit command. For people with a two
button mouse: press both buttons together to emulate the missing
middle button.
When trying to run MGR, if you get:
can't find the screen
make sure you have a /dev entry for your display device, e.g. on
a Sun /dev/bwtwo0. If not, as root cd to /dev, and type
"MAKEDEV bwtwo0". Otherwise, you might need the -S/dev/bwtwo0
or (on Linux) the -S640x480 command line option when starting
mgr.
can't find the mouse
make sure /dev/mouse exists, usually as a symbolic link to the
real device name for your mouse. If you haven't permission to
write in /dev, then something like a -m/dev/cua0 option can be
given when starting mgr. Also, make sure you've supplied the
right mouse protocol choice when you configured mgr. The mouse
may speak Microsoft, even if that is not the brand name.
can't get a pty
make sure all of /dev/[tp]ty[pq]? are owned by root, mode 666,
and all programs referenced with the "shell" option in your
.mgrc startup file (if any) exist and are executable.
none but the default font
make sure MGR is looking in the right place for its fonts.
Check the Configfile in the source or see whether a
-f/usr/mgr/font option to mgr fixes the problem.
completely hung (not even the mouse track moves)
login to your machine from another terminal (or rlogin) and kill
the mgr process. A buckey-Q key can quit MGR if the keyboard
still works.
4.1. Applications not aware of MGR
Any tty-oriented application can be run in an MGR window without
further ado. Screen-oriented applications using termcap or curses can
get the correct number of lines and columns by your using shape(1) to
reshape the window or using set_termcap(1) to obtain the correct
termcap.
4.2. MGR Applications (clients) distributed with the server
bdftomgr
converts some BDF fonts to MGR fonts
browse
an icon browser
bury
bury this window
c_menu
vi menus from C compiler errors
clock
digital display of time of day
clock2
analog display of time of day
close
close this window, iconify
color
set the foreground and background color for text in this window
colormap
read or write in the color lookup table
cursor
change appearance of the character cursor
cut
cut text from this window into the cut buffer
cycle
display a sequence of icons
dmgr
crude ditroff previewer
fade
fade a home movie script from one scene to another
font
change to a new font in this window
hpmgr
hp 2621 terminal emulator
ico
animate an icosahedron or other polyhedron
iconmail
notification of mail arrival
iconmsgs
message arrival notification
ify
iconify and deiconify windows
loadfont
load a font from the file system
maze
a maze game
mclock
micky mouse clock
menu
create or select a pop-up menu
mgr
bellcore window system server and window manager
mgrbd
boulder-dash game
mgrbiff
watch mailbox for mail and notify
mgrload
graph of system load average
mgrlock
lock the console
mgrlogin
graphical login controller
mgrmag
magnify a part of the screen, optionally dump to file
mgrmail
notification of mail arrival
mgrmode
set or clear window modes
mgrmsgs
message arrival notification
mgrplot
Unix "plot" graphics filter
mgrsclock
sandclock
mgrshowfont
browse through mgr fonts
mgrsketch
a sketching/drawing program
mgrview
view mgr bitmap images
mless
start up less/more in separate window, menu added for less
mphoon
display the current phase of the moon
mvi
start up vi in a separate window, mouse pointing
oclose
(old) close a window
omgrmail
(old) notification of mail arrival
pbmrawtomgr
convert pbm raw bitmap to mgr bitmap format
pbmstream
split out a stream of bitmaps
pbmtoprt
printer output from PBM
pgs
ghostscript patch and front end
pilot
a bitmap browser
resetwin
cleanup window state after client crashes messily
rotate
rotate a bitmap 90 degrees.
screendump
write graphics screen dump to a bitmap file
set_console
redirect console messages to this window
set_termcap
output an appropriate TERM and TERMCAP setting
setname
name a window, for messages and iconifying
shape
reshape this window
square
square this window
squeeze
compress mgr bitmap using run-length encoding
startup
produce a skeleton startup file for current window layout
texmgr
TeX dvi file previewer
text2font, font2text
convert between mgr font format and text dump
unsqueeze
uncompress mgr bitmap using run length encoding
window_print
print an image of a window
zoom
an icon editor
bounce, grav, grid, hilbert, mgreyes, stringart, walk
graphics demos
4.3. MGR-aware clients distributed separately, see "SUPPORT" file
calctool
on-screen calculator
chess
frontend to /usr/games/chess
gnu emacs
editor with lisp/term/mgr.el mouse & menu support
gnuplot
universal scientific data plotting
metafont
font design and creation
origami
folding editor
pbmplus
portable bitmap format conversions, manipulations
plplot
slick scientific data plotting
? a groff PBM driver using Hershey fonts
5. Programming for MGR
The MGR programmers manual, the C language applications interface, is
found in the doc directory in troff/nroff form. It covers general
concepts, the function/macro calls controlling the server, a sample
application, with an index and glossary.
Porting client code used with older versions of MGR sometimes requires
the substitution of
#include <mgr/mgr.h>
for
#include <term.h>
#include <dump.h>
and clients using old-style B_XOR, B_CLEAR, et al instead of BIT_XOR,
BIT_CLR, et al can be accommodated by writing
#define OLDMGRBITOPS
#include <mgr/mgr.h>
Compiling client code generally requires compiler options like the
following.
-I/usr/mgr/include -L/usr/mgr/lib -lmgr
One can get some interactive feel for the MGR server functions by
reading and experimenting with the mgr.el terminal driver for GNU
Emacs which implements the MGR interface library in ELisp.
The usual method of inquiring state from the server has the potential
of stumbling on a race condition if the client also expects a large
volume of event notifications. The problem arises if an
(asynchronous) event notification arrives when a (synchronous) inquiry
response was expected. If this arises in practice (unusual) then the
MGR state inquiry functions would have to be integrated with your
event handling loop.
The only major drawing function missing from the MGR protocol, it
seems, is an area fill for areas other than upright rectangles. There
is new code for manipulating the global colormap, as well as
(advisory) allocation and freeing of color indices owned by windows.
If you are thinking of hacking on the server, you can find the mouse
driver in mouse.* and mouse_get.*, the grotty parts of the keyboard
interface in kbd.c, and the interface to the display in the
src/libbitblit/* directories. The main procedure, much
initialization, and the top level input loop are in mgr.c, and the
interpretation of escape sequences is in put_window.c.
6. More documentation
The programmer's manual is essential for concepts.
Nearly all the clients supplied come with a man page which is
installed into /usr/mgr/man/man1 or man6. Other useful man pages are
bitblit.3, font.5, and bitmap.5. There is some ambiguity in the docs
in distinguishing the internal bitmap format found in your frame-
buffer and the external bitmap format found in files, e.g. icons.
The mgr.1 man page covers command line options, commands in the
~/.mgrc startup file, mouse and menu interaction with the server, and
hot-key shortcuts available on systems with such hot-keys.
Many of the fonts in /usr/mgr/font/* are described to some extent in
/usr/mgr/font/*.txt, e.g. /usr/mgr/font/FONTDIR.txt gives X-style font
descriptions for the fonts obtained in .bdf format. Font names end in
WxH, where W and H are the decimal width and height in pixels of each
character box.
7. Credit for MGR
Stephen Uhler, with others working at Bellcore, was the original
designer and implementer of MGR, so Bellcore has copyrighted much of
the code and documentation for MGR under the following conditions.
* Permission is granted to copy or use this program, EXCEPT that it
* may not be sold for profit, the copyright notice must be reproduced
* on copies, and credit should be given to Bellcore where it is due.
One required showing of the copyright notice is the startup title
screen.
Other credits to:
o Stephen Hawley for his wonderful icons.
o Tommy Frandsen for the VGA linux library.
o Tom Heller for his Gasblit library.
o Andrew Haylett for the Mouse driver code.
o Dan McCrackin for his gasblit->linux patches.
o Dave Gymer, dgp@cs.nott.ac.uk, for the Startrek effect fix.
o Alex Liu for first releasing a working Linux version of MGR.
o Lars Aronsson (aronsson@lysator.liu.se) for text2font and an
ISO8859-1 8-bit font.
o Harry Pulley (hcpiv@grumpy.cis.uoguelph.ca,
hcpiv@snowhite.cis.uoguelph.ca) for the Coherent port.
o Vance Petree & Grant Edwards & Udo Munk for their work on Hercules.
o Udo Munk for his work on serial mouse initialization & select.
o Norman Bartek & Hal Snyder at Mark Williams Co. for their help
with some bugs & with Coherent device drivers.
o Extra thanks to Zeyd Ben Halim for lots of helpful patches,
especially the adaptation of selection.
o Bradley Bosch, brad@lachman.com, for lots of patches from his 3b1
port, which fix bugs and implement new and desirable features.
o Andrew Morton, applix@runxtsa.runx.oz.au, who first wrote the cut-
word code.
o Kapil Paranjape, kapil@motive.math.tifr.res.in, for the EGA
support.
o Michael Haardt for MOVIE support fixes, bug fixes, separation of
the libbitblit code into output drivers, expansion of the libmgr,
and origami folding of the code.
o Yossi Gil for many fonts.
o Carsten Emde, carsten@thlmak.pr.net.ch, for mphoon.
o Vincent Broman for middle mouse-button emulation, linting, Sun
cgsix support, VGA colormap acess, and integration of the sunport
code into Haardt's layering scheme.
All bitmap fonts from any source are strictly public domain in the
USA. The 575 fixed-width fonts supplied with MGR were obtained from
Uhler, the X distribution, Yossi Gil, and elsewhere. The Hershey
vector fonts and the code for rendering them are probably freely
redistributable.