Comment by SageRaven | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SageRaven | Hacker News Reader

Nice to see like-minded folks out there. Like him, I run X mostly for having multiple full-height rxvt+screen sessions (three per virtual desktop).

I only use three graphical apps: Firefox, pidgin (grudgingly), and the Qt interface for VirtualBox. The rest are text apps and custom shell scripts for accomplishing tasks in tandem with those apps (such a "find | random | mpg123" for shuffling music directories).

I highly recommend "evilwm" for managing such a setup. Its single-pixel window borders with no window decorations is desktop minimalism as its finest. It's also got the lightest memory footprint of all the minimal WMs out there. Windows can be moved, re-sized, and snapped to locations with keystrokes. For fine-tuned placement of regularly-used apps, a simple shell script can be crafted to launch them with the precise geometry you require (or ALT+MOUSE_LEFT to lift the window). I have hot-keys defined (using "xbindkeys") that will populate virtual desktops to exact specifications.

My only gripe with this setup is the competition for key chords amongst emacs, screen, and evilwm itself. That, and every once in a while, some web page will throw a Firefox window that I simply cannot close without the "x" screen decoration (at least not without closing Firefox itself -- grrr...).

Haven't tried evilwm, but the reasons you list for liking it apply also to XMonad, which I use and love.

I've tried awesome, wmii, dwm and a couple other tiling window managers and XMonad is by far my favorite.

Bit of a learning curve if you aren't into Haskell already, but it's very sensible and intuitive syntax that you can easily grasp from the many examples in the XMonad config archive.

Highly recommended. Active community, easy to extend. Lot's of reference configs. Changed my entire computing life...

It's tiles, all the way down.

I've tried quite a few window managers but I must say the automatic tiling wm actually make me prefer gnome, what really seems to do well with me is ratpoison or stumpwm. The control of tiling seems to work great and both are quite customizable (especially stumpwm). (I use C-, for my prefix and C-t in tmux) Recently I just use gnome though because my laptop just works there and have a full screen web browser and a full screen tmux (so I at least have some tiling).

I used XMonad for a while until I realized how much time I was spending customizing configuration files, tiling layouts, rc files, and whatnot. I like floating window managers, specifically evilwm, because it isn't very configurable or extensible. It just does what I expect, and I don't have to think about it.

Evilwm is awesome. I like to compile it with mouse support turned off on my netbook, so that all window manipulation is performed by keyboard only (Vi compatable keystrokes). I also turn off solid drag.

For tiling window managers, I find Ratpoison to be the best, but I also like Dwm.

Just a nit, but what version of random works like that? BSD random(6) "reads lines from the standard input and copies them to the standard output with a probability of 1/denominator. The default value for denominator is 2."

I ended up writing my own (overengineered) program, but I'd be interested in knowing what you use.

I use "foo | random -f -" but I omitted that for the sake of brevity, hoping it would be taken as a generic name for a script/program that shuffled lines for illustrative purposes. I personally use textproc/rl for shuffling lines, as it's faster than stock random(6).

For the overlaping keychords problem, I've found that it helps if I bind my window manager actions to the Super_L (the windows button). I've also mapped that to the capslock key for easy access. As practically no programs use the windows key, I can be sure I won't accidentally send commands to unintended programs and mess things up while trying to move windows around.

I need to update the page...

I actually use stumpwm now, which seems to fit all the things you like about evilwm. (Plus you can connect to the Common Lisp instance running it and poke around in the environment any way you want.)

You can throw away pidgin if you really want to, and just use an IRC gateway to the IM networks: http://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/news.r.html

You can also control virtualbox from the command line such as:

VBoxManage startvm "Your Machine Name"

http://andunix.net/info/virtualbox/cli

You can't use finch instead of pidgin?

finch's sudo-graphical ncurses interface is a little awkward. I know there's an xmpp plugin for irssi, so that might be nicer if you just use GTalk.

  > finch's sudo-graphical ncurses interface is a little awkward.

It tries to replicate all of the windows that the GUI interface creates, but in a text environment where you can only view one window at a time. It's almost like someone didn't want to figure out a way to redesign the interface to work better in a text environment (and maybe just take some cues from the text-based irc clients out there).

[ This may be somewhat inaccurate, I've had little experience with it, but this was my impression. It left a bad taste in my mouth.]

Finch is actually pretty easy to use once you memorize the keyboard shortcuts.

On a related note, I recently switched from Pidgin to Finch, and it boosted my productivity at work. I'm a bit OCD, and every time my Pidgin window would blink, I would feel compelled to read the new message immediately. The end result was that I was allowing myself to get interrupted a lot, all day, every day.

Now that I've switched to PuTTY/ssh+screen+Finch (the original goal was privacy-at-work, the boost in productivity was just icing on the cake!), I find that I only check for new instant messages on MY schedule; e.g., when I'm doing a big compile, or need a break anyway.

I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a productivity boost.

I could, but since the core engine is the same as that of pidgin, the memory usage is almost as high. If I'm gonna use that much RAM for the console app, I may as well keep the GUI version up and running.

Ever considered using just a straight Jabber client and a gateway for each non-Jabber protocol that you use? I am quite partial to http://psi-im.org/ .

I've tried a few of the dedicated console clients for various protocols. However, I'm lazy and find its just easier to put up with pidgin. That, and I like the OTR crypto plugin.

The only reason I use IM at all is for a long-standing client who insists on using it for 99% of real-time communications.

I've been on the 'net since 1990, and I've never even used IRC (I know, I know -- I should hand in my geek card...). I've always been a store-and-forward kind of person, and have always preferred email and (in its heyday) USENET.

I have a similar setup, and love evilwm as well. I haven't run into too many key conflicts, though I do mainly use vi instead of emacs, and tmux instead of screen. I start evilwm with "-mask1 mod4 -mask2 mod4" to bind the meta key to the Windows button.

You can do meta-Esc to close those Firefox windows.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com