Siemens RTL Tiled Window Manager

what is it?

RTL is a tiled window manager created for the X11R2/3 engine in 1988. it uses libraries like X10 (or liboldx nowadays), and aside from that I'd recommend installing the entire X11 development kit (well, not counting acceleration libraries), including imake.

what changes did you make, exactly?

well, a tiny tweak to the input.c file, fixing a very specific compiler quirk that seemed to break the thing. I initialised the union wait structure with a single integer variable, as that's the size that's expected to be passed in the vague wait3 call below. i tested it, and it works fine with the modern X.Org implementations, so no worries. you don't need to pass any weird compiler flags anymore.

how do you add things to the Tools menu?

ah, you just follow this format in the ~/.rtl.tools file:

Label
    command

for each tool you just add another entry like this. personally, I have it store this:

UXTerm
    uxterm
Console
    xconsole
Clock
    xclock
Calculator
    xcalc

is it worth it in the modern day?

mmmmm, not really, it's just my love for the late 80's - early 90's computing aesthetics.

where did you even find this?

I have two sources to cite: for one, this page brought its existence to my attention; and for two, this forum post gave me a mostly patched source.

Screenshots