$Id: README,v 1.6 2003/09/28 00:22:44 faugn Exp $

Kahakai is a fork of the Waimea window manager (www.waimea.org), with
the goal of allowing as much internal customization as possible.
Kahakai uses SWIG (www.swig.org) to provide wrappers that allow high-
level scripting languages to access the internals of the core of the
window manager, which is written in C++.

This is seen as the natural evolution of Waimea's powerful action
system, coupled with Sawfish-esque scripting capabilities.  One
shortcoming of Sawfish is that it utilizes lisp, which, while a
perfectly fine language, is unfortunately not quite as popular as
others.  With SWIG, Kahakai opens itself to nearly every common (and
not so common) scripting (and not *only* scripting languages :)
language, including Perl, Python, Tcl, Ruby, Guile, MzScheme, Java,
OCAML, CHICKEN, and C#.  In the same sense that Waimea encouraged user-
customization of their interaction with the window manager, Kahakai
encourages user customization of the lower-level behavior of the window
manager -- in whatever language the user may find most familiar or
suitable.

Kahakai is forked from the code in Waimea CVS as of mid-May 2003 (the
same code had been there for ~6 months so it may be familiar to you ;),
with some patches applied that were created by various members of the 
Waimea user community.

At present time, the rest of the window manager is basically "just
Waimea", so for info on that we refer to a section of the Waimea
README:

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INTRODUCTION

   The design goal for waimea is to create the most efficient
   desktop  working  environment  available.  To achieve this
   waimea is a fast and highly customizable virtual  multiple
   desktop  window  manager.   It  has  a very advanced style
   engine with features like blackbox style  support,  pixmap
   style  support  and transparent textures. Text can be ren-
   dered double buffered using both  X  core  fonts  and  Xft
   fonts.   Waimea also includes a fast lightweight menu sys-
   tem with dynamic menus support.  The built in action  con-
   figuration  system makes waimea the most configurable win-
   dow manager available. It allows the user to set up waimea
   to behave as any other window manager or in new ways never
   before possible.

   Features already included are:
      Virtual desktop sizes
		Multiple desktops
      Blackbox image rendering engine (blackbox style support)
		Pixmap styles
      Translucent textures using Xrender extension
      Action configuration system
      Advanced menu system (with dynamic menus support)
      Standard X core fonts
      Xft fonts (anti-aliased fonts)
		Double buffered text
      Dockapp handler system
      Task switcher
      Configurable titlebar buttons
		KDE3/GNOME2 support

