Argon

Now that the pace of my schoolwork is starting to pick up, I have had less time to work on my window manager. But I have made progress. However, my claim that the first release was usable may have been premature. At least, it wasn't usable to me, and since I am my entire target audience, that is a bit of a problem. So, I will not be making another release until I have actually started using my window manager for my own window-management needs.

One other accomplishment is that my window manager is longer called "KDWM", which was rather dull. It now has a more exciting name: "Argon". But I didn't only choose this name because it did well in the focus groups. Argon (the window manager) was originally meant to be "declarative". When I began working on it, I had a few ideas about what that would mean to a window manager, and they all turned out to be wrong. Eventually, I dropped the word from every document—except the acronym, where it lived on in the letter "D".

I have since discovered that Argon is quite declarative indeed, and the new name is intended not only to sound wonderful but also to emphasize that fact. How does it do this? Argon, the element, is one of the noble gases, which means that its electronic configuration is stable enough that it almost never engages in chemical reactions. I want my Argon to exhibit a similar level of stability and predictability.