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Comment by shubb | Hacker News Reader

I tried this a while ago - its okay so long as you are doing specific, limited activities.

If you need to explore beyond the things that you have already figured out for to do it slows you down. Websites you need don't work in lynx, Android dev is slower to pick up console first, etc. People expect you to see the pictures and word docs on your mail, or contact you via WhatsApp.

You figure your way round these one by one, or give up after an hour and use the normal tool. And then onto tomorrows new distraction.

Eventually this is a time sink.

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The whole point of his setup is that he has ratpoison ready in case he needs to use an X-11 application. His screenshots show Firefox running, among others.

Um.

He's running X with a minimalist tiling wm with only one window at a time, not trying to live through a VT100.

Of course, some Hackernews is now going to tell me about how this setup falls down hard when you need to do real work and how sensible people just use KDE or GNOME -- or Windows.

It's probably a little difficult running GIMP for photo editing. GIMP wants a half-dozen windows open at the same time to get much done.

Personally, I like having a few widgets on-screen all the time - a clock, a volume control - and I enjoy having two or three things open on-screen: a terminal and a browser, for instance, or two terminals ssh'ing to different machines. Having lots of display area helps. Pretty much every window manager can handle this, and it's just a matter of figuring out which one gets out of my way fastest.

Many tiling WMs (e.g. i3, xmonad) support floating windows. Also, GIMP supports single-window mode these days.

Even dwm supports floating windows.

What you said about GIMP was true in 2002, but GIMP's new Single Window Mode makes it an ideal fit for a tiling WM.

I use dwm in a similar fashion as the article's author. Most of my work happens in a terminal, but I always have a Chrome window open somewhere.

There's little to no point in doing what you describe (and perhaps you have missed the author's point); having X available but using it sparingly is probably the most efficient way to get by.

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