Enlightenment sets up a number of environment-based variables for other programmes and the users themselves
to ascertain exactly what is what. They can be viewed by typing set|grep variable,
whose variables are:
Please note that this does not work for all versions of Enlightenment, but should for E14 and higher.
Right now iconisation is under development, as well as an icon box affair, which will react much like a kind of bounded area. The other thing that will be new in 0.15.0 is TrueType fonts for window titles (if you didn't already have them before ;). The next things will be the addition of better internal documentation, menus, pagers and other multi-desktop tools, maximization buttons, tool tips / contextual information popups, and other "solid gold goodies" as Daffy Duck was ever so quite to iterate in the Giant's Castle. Stay tuned, true believer!
Possibly not. I think everybody is currently satisfied with what we have now. If there are new ones, they will most probably be simple and minor in scope. (Mandrake has said that he has absolutely no intention of requiring Gnome libraries on the system in order to use Enlightenment, for instance. I quite agree, considering how problematic it already is for some subset of users, and that would be for most users, and increasing the learning curve too dramatically would make the bar they'd have to jump over too high.
To tell you the truth, not too much. A truly Enlightened application would communicate through IPC with Enlightenment itself and serve itself up a dish of awareness of the desktop in doing so. Most people would call any application that uses Imlib or Fnlib based graphics and text to be Enlightened, however. One works with language in the common usage, and that is the common usage. Even at this "base" level, many resources are being shared between applications, Enlightenment, and Imlib and such is a beneficial beginning to a desktop architecture.
Other programmes that could be considered Enlightened are ones that use StringList and/or modify things dealing with the environment, work with a library that is based off of any of these.
One other library that is making its way out of guerilla development is Anlib, that promises to be some kind of animation based library that is Imlib-centric in nature, although its practicality in the desktop has yet to be proven. (Anybody want to make something useful that uses Anlib animation?)
As far as I know, they are only in the works. The pinions of this effort is probably going to be centred around Mandrake's up and coming MAW Project. I would urge anyone interested in this kind of development to find out more about MAW and work centrally with others to develop a good framework of discussion and development.
Eterm's developers, Michael Jenning (alias KainX) and Tuomo Venäläinen (alias Vendu), have said that it will be rewritten from the ground up using MAW as a framework, although I have heard nothing of any other projects in particular outside of this. I guess we'll have to wait for it to develop first. (grin)