IceWM 4.0.0 released
IceWM 4.0.0 has rolled out with a slew of enhancements. This latest IceWM update brings some solid changes to a core feature: the Alt+Tab window switcher. It has always been handy for quickly jumping between open apps, but now it handles even more windows than before without slowing down. The new version works well both when you cycle horizontally through icons and vertically in that familiar list view.
A really useful addition is called QuickSwitchPreview. As you're using the Alt+Tab feature to switch applications, this lets you peek at which ones are available right then, kind of like a live preview function. And here's another nice touch: you can now use all your keyboard navigation keys with the Alt+Tab interface itself.
Beyond the window switching improvements, the release includes other noteworthy updates too. High-resolution icons look much better in settings like WM_ICON_SIZE, and there’s more consistency across different display resolutions handled by IceWM now. By default, applications now render using 32-bit RGBA alpha blending, which probably makes things smoother to see on modern screens.
Two preferences have been removed from the mix: DoubleBuffer and QuickSwitchMaxWidth. It seems they were unnecessary with the newer architecture.
Speaking of fixes, this release addresses several ongoing issues. There's a specific bug fix for keyboard layout switching problems that affected OpenBSD users previously. The desktop mini icon dragging feature also works correctly across secondary displays now, something that wasn't quite right before if you had multiple screens set up under IceWM 4.x.
And the taskbar properly reflects changes to your workspace name even when external programs update it, which is a good bit more reliable than ever.
On the international side, icewm-menu-fdo can now correctly initialize the user's default locale. It also enforces limits on window title lengths (128 bytes) and trims any trailing whitespace there might be. There was one tricky issue too, an I/O failure related to /proc/net/dev that turned out to be a problem with some of IceWM's internal scripts.
Finally, the development team has paid attention to users working at higher DPI settings, like on modern laptops or external displays. The development team has adjusted the submenu indicator for better appearance and improved performance by caching icon drawings on the server side; this caching method, which is detailed in the Pictures section, helps everything run a bit faster when searching for icons.
So, essentially, IceWM 4.0.0 improves its classic window switching method significantly while also cleaning up preferences, refining display handling across locales and hardware setups, and boosting performance on high-res screens.
For more information, visit the GitHub page below:
Release icewm-4.0.0
Features Release 4.0.0 features improvements to the Alt+Tab quick switch. The Alt+Tab window switcher can now handle large numbers of application windows in both horizontal and in vertical mode.
