Wily FAQ

What does "wilydiag: File exists: can't open fifo" mean?
Wily opens and listens on a fifo in /tmpin case some program tries to communicate with it. If you're not doing anything tricky like that, it won't get used at all. Ordinarily wily cleans the fifo up when it exits, but if something dire happens Wily may not get a chance to clean up. The fifo will be named $WILYFIFO if that is defined, otherwise /tmp/wilyUSER$DISPLAY, where USER is your login name. Just remove it and restart wily to be able to use wily messages.
"Why does my compiler/editor/whatever complain about illegal characters? The line looks fine to me."
Chances are that you've managed to enter a control character accidentally, and the font you're using doesn't display control characters. The easiest way to check is to select the line (or other text) that's causing the complaint, and click on "|cat -v" (or some other program that can display control characters, such as vis or od). I find ^A the most common offender.

The Wily Window Manager?

Window management is probably the biggest open problem with Wily, probably because there's no real solution, only heuristics.

The first iteration of Wily creatied a bunch of separate X windows and let the window manager handle arranging them. This seems a more modular, tool-based approach. However, bitter experience showed that most existing window managers just don't cut it when you're quickly creating and deleting lots of windows. Acme's window management,was much better.

The logical solution then would be to write an X window manager that works like the window management in Acme. However:

So Wily is designed to be run in one big window, and it does its own window management within that. It's a bit of a hack, but probably the best solution for the moment.

Still, I hope it shouldn't be too hard to remove the "Wily is managing all the windows" assumption from the code if some brave soul solves the problems mentioned above.