IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager | Hacker News Reader

IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager

ice-wm.org

123 pointsconductor69 comments

Having a very Obi-Wan "that's a name I've not heard in a long time" moment. I can't remember ever settling on IceWM at any point - in my early forays into Linux I always just used Blackbox, before using KDE until it got weird, and then just settling on Xfce and Wxfm because my needs are simple. I'd be interested to hear what it excels at?

I use IceWM for well over a decade now. It's a nice WM. It is close enough to Win 95/98/2000/XP to not feel too new in the beginning, with its start menu and regular window decorations. But it also has the features of a real Linux WM, with virtual desktops, window rules, mouse focus settings, configurable shortcuts, integrated command runner etc. I don't use use the taskbar anymore (replaced it with a combination of conky/simdock/trayer, but the desktop still works with IceWM at the core), but the integrated network and load indicator was very useful to get additional feedback, that a program is starting or stuck, or a download finished or paused.

It's a complete package, but at the same time a very lightweight WM. It's great.

Just back then the default theme was ugly. Coming from Ubuntu I'm still using https://www.box-look.org/p/1018090/ - doesn't look any worse than a modern DE to me now.

> It's a nice WM.

This sounds like a good slogan.

It's a nice WM.

It's an ice WM.

Random off topic...

This actually has happened with some words coming to English, because of the ‘a’ vs ‘an’ rule when preceding a consonant or a vowel.

A great example of this is the word ‘an apron’ and ‘a napkin’ come from the same old French word ‘naperon’. For some reason in one case the ‘n’ transferred from one form of the word vs. not in the other, I believe that’s referred to as faulty separation, and there are a bunch of other words that it happened with as well.

I believe "newt" also has an N for this reason.

> when preceding a consonant or a vowel.

When preceding the sound of consonant or a vowel.

This is somewhat tautological, since consonants and vowels are already speech sounds.

No, not really. The word "user" starts with a consonant sound, for example, even though "u" is a written vowel.

From what I have seen, people writing about linguistics do not usually bother specifying this distinction in this context. It is usually implied that an expression like "following a vowel" or "following a consonant" has nothing to do with orthography, but the actual phonetics. The orthography is not really considered a source of truth.

They are sounds as well as groups of letters, but the OP didn't specify, hence my clarification.

Some examples:

* "He has an MBA" because "M" sounds like it starts with a vowel (here: "em").

* "a university" ("you-ni...")

In linguistics, it's called rebracketing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing

> Rebracketing often focuses on highly probable word boundaries: "a noodle" might become "an oodle", since "an oodle" sounds just as grammatically correct as "a noodle", and likewise "an eagle" might become "a neagle", but "the bowl" would not become "th ebowl" and "a kite" would not become "ak ite".

> Technically, bracketing is the process of breaking an utterance into its constituent parts. The term is akin to parsing for larger sentences, but it is normally restricted to morphological processes at the sublexical level, i.e. within the particular word or lexeme. For example, the word uneventful is conventionally bracketed as [un+[event+ful]], and the bracketing [[un+event]+ful] leads to completely different semantics. Re-bracketing is the process of seeing the same word as a different morphological decomposition, especially where the new etymology becomes the conventional norm. The name false splitting, also called misdivision, in particular is often reserved for the case where two words mix but still remain two words (as in the "noodle" and "eagle" examples above).

Other examples:

> The English word outrage is a loanword from French, where it was formed by combining the adverb outre (meaning "beyond") with the suffix -age; thus, the original literal meaning is "beyondness" – that is, beyond what is acceptable. The rebracketing as a compound of out- with the noun or verb rage has led to both a different pronunciation than the one to be expected for such a loanword (compare umbrage) and an additional meaning of "angry reaction" not present in French.

> Many words coined in a scientific context as neologisms are formed with suffixes arising from rebracketing existing terms. One example is the suffix -ol used to name alcohols, such as methanol. Its origin is the rebracketing of al•cohol as alcoh•ol. The word alcohol derives from the Arabic al-kuḥl, in which al is the definite article and kuḥl (i.e., kohl), is based on the Semitic triliteral root K-Ḥ-L.

IceWM is everything I love about Linux from a ux perspective.

IceWM is brutally fast and never crashes or loads. It handles multiple desktops light years better than Windows. Yet it's so simple and lightweight you'd assume it's barely doing anything at all. And it's awesome on old hardware.

Right! That's why I stumbled over it actually. Needed something for my dad's AMD K6-2-333 system, with 64MB ram and a 4GB HDD. Windows 95 was not that useable anymore and XP obviously not an option for that system. Thus the second Ubuntu release with IceWM it was, and when I later changed my own system to Linux I stuck to IceWM, since it worked great (and I already had learnt how to configure it).

I believe it's intended to be lightweight. I've used it in places where I need to run a GUI app on a remote machine that acts like a server. Looking at it now, my instance is using 20MB ram.

Yes that's also my go to WM for x2go. Light, efficient and doesnt get in the way.

It's funny, I haven't used Linux in some time, but my choices were very similar to yours. At least back in the late 90s and early 00s, IceWM seemed to be the Window Manager that was designed to look like a sexier Windows 95. 15-20 years later, that seems like a weird thing to hang your hat on, but it looks like that is pretty close to where it is.

I also tried Blackbox, used Gnome's desktop for a while, but it was too heavy and settled on XFCE. Were I to go back to Linux, I would probably end up on XFCE again (or maybe Elementary).

I put Elementary on my daughter’s inherited 2011 MacBook Air and runs very nicely (far better than whatever macOS it had on in the end). Had to replace Epiphany as the default browser because lots of things didn’t work but it seems a reasonable environment. Lags a bit behind Ubuntu though.

I've played around with blackbox, fluxbox and all kinds of lightweight WMs but settled on xfce as well. Never liked Gnome and KDE because they were resource hogs and trying to be like "Windows".

It's the best combination of lightweight plus Windows-like. I will still use it for setting up a limited machine for someone just moving off Windows. It's more work to set up, but very stable.

Same feeling. I used to prefer WindowMaker, but switched wm's in an almost weekly basis and definitely IceWM got its share.

I used the heck out of WindowMaker back in the day. Makes me wish I could use a Linux laptop or desktop in my day job nowadays. (we use Macs, and I've moved from sysadmin to devops)

IceWM Screenshots Collection (https://ice-wm.org/screenshots/)

I see two instances of the rootcow in these sceeenshots. I had assumed rootcow was specifically a Berkeley thing circa the 90s. Was it a broader phenomenon?

I imagine that person's shell profile pipes fortune to cowsay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowsay

Indeed the link to the archived web page from that wiki page confirms this originated in Berkeley (the link to tmonroe’s page). It’s nice to see that it made it widely.

Slackware.. my first Linux district. In 1995. Classic shell font. I miss those days, but modern Linux is amazing.

They say you never forget your first, but I’m not sure that’s true anymore as the combination of cloud VMs and graphical installers have reduced nearly all Linux installs to a couple mouse clicks.

Well, rest assured that for at least some noobies they will still remember their first.

For me, it was ~ 2 - 3 years ago, I had just bought myself a new laptop.

I knew what Linux was from some experience with a raspberry pi, and wanted to try it on my main machine, so I installed Fedora as a dual boot.

I've only booted Windows on that(this) machine twice, and no longer have it installed.

Edit: The installer itself was graphical and mouse clicks, but X11 did not play well with optimus graphics at the time, so I found myself offline using man pages and tmux very quickly. Daily drove TUI only for a couple weeks before I sat down and fixed X. Hopefully this counts.

Everyone has to start somewhere. No Linux purity guardians here :)

This depends on which distro you are installing. There is still many CLI based installations. Arch Linux for example.

My first too. I remember installing Linux with 30 or so floppy disks. I also use to go through and configure the kernel and build it myself because I was into over clocking at the time.

Whats happening in the FileZilla screenshot?

To bad none of these are paired with themes/configurations. Anyone have any idea how the 7th one is configured?

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/2936638/44629544-3...

Look pretty good...

I think it was one of the included themes, maybe nice or nice2. I loved the "Motif" one, though.

If you have a thing for obscure window managers, are looking for massive configurability and have time to sink, check out Fvwm2[1]. Fully configurable using text files[2][3] that can be version controlled.

Edit: apparently it has been revived as Fvwm3[4].

[1] https://www.fvwm.org/

[2] https://satyanash.net/software/2011/12/25/my-fvwm2-desktop.h...

[3] https://satyanash.net/software/2012/12/04/fvwm2-explained.ht...

[4] https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3

I use IceWM as my daily driver since it has all the features I need and is very lightweight.

The maintainer is super nice too: I had a feature request in mind, raised an issue on GH, and the he eventually implemented it.

It may be appropriate to link to the donation page of the author: https://gijsbers.github.io/donate/

Thanks for IceWM!

We changed the url from https://github.com/ice-wm/icewm/releases/tag/2.0.0 to the project home page, since this project doesn't appear to have been discussed on HN before.

Funny to see this. About a month ago I took a break from my usual environment (Linux Mint Cinnamon) and gave Icewm a try. I decided after a week of usage that it did everything I need in a window manager: fully configurable with hotkeys, multiple virtual desktops, a taskbar, a decent "start" button with a menu system you can edit to your heart's content.

I usually like transparent terminals with a slight shading to them and icewm uses older technology so the newer terminals don't provide transparency. I fixed that by moving to aterm which in turn gave me trouble by not handling unicode.

So icewm is perhaps dated. But it's very lightweight, a bit more mainstream-feeling than openbox etc., and I thought it's a good compromise between a KDE/Mate/Gnome3 and openbox/fluxbox/i3 etc. It's nice for remote machines you remote into where you want some basic GUI functionality but not a full-blown desktop environment.

rxvt-unicode is what you want.

Wow that’s another Obi-Wan!

I moved fro black box to xfce as my WM About a decade ago for the wifi integration. I remain With it on my desktop as I like having the docked apps (pidgin, slack, teams, vlc and volume), and of course inertia. Like the rest of linux it just works and doesn’t get in my way.

However aside from Firefox, and screenshots, everything I launch is via alt-escape which pops upend a new rxvt-Unicode window.

Just append nm-applet & or wicd-gtk -t & to ~/.fluxbox/autostart. For the volume tray, volumeicon & will do the same at the end of autostart.

add this to iceWM startup file and you get all the transparency back: "compton --config /dev/null --backend glx &"

IceWM used to be the fallback window manager in some OpenSUSE installations (haven't made any for a while, so no idea whether that is still the case). If you configured your desktop environment to death or your machine was very short on memory you could still get a simple graphical session. I don't think I needed it more twice over 5-10 years.

Reading the FAQ looks like a jump 15-25 years back. They mention Windows95, xmodmap instead of XKB for example. No mentioning of 4K displays or multiple monitors. Whether that's a good or bad thing? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder...

Seems very configurable without getting a resource hog. If you enjoy tweaking things on your old 1GB RAM laptop this might be for you.

I did not see that it competes to replace my i3 (tiling only), so I stay with the latter for now.

>IceWM used to be the fallback window manager in some OpenSUSE installations

Yes, Tumbleweed still installs it by default.

I’ve always used IceWM because it was the default or forced upon me (flashbacks to my high school, which took CentOS 6 and replaced all the logos with the school’s mascot and changed the background picture so they could brand it as their custom Linux distro). Does anyone actually use it because they prefer it? If so, why?

It has an OS/2 theme, which goes well with the DFM file manager. But it's been a long time since I last used it.

Today rox is a good replacement.

I used it 20 years ago on SPARC Solaris as it was the easiest window manager to compile from the source and replace Solaris’ default CDE with it.

I once had a task to set up custom web crawlers. I made my crawlers as a Firefox extension, and to host a Firefox instance, I chose debian I think and IceVM. IceVM was light on the resources and it was easy to set up so that my Firefox starts minimized.

You could probably use something like Xvfb instead of running a full window manager.

been using it for five years now. it's no-nonsense and does exactly what i want it to. no fancy graphics. multiple monitors, autosuspend and fullscreen work without configuration. has a fancy liquid crystal clock.

it's the peak of desktop computing.

Once upon a time, yes. I also remember it being fairly popular. I suspect IceWM dwindled in popularity since the Linux desktop evolved in other directions since then, with people choosing either desktop environments or more focussed or experimental window managers.

Use it for about 10 years although I try new WMs out of curiosity every year. But IceWM is unbeatable, it does everything and is extremely lightweight. I wanted my own skin and drawn it. I wanted compositing (transparency) I just run compton on top of IceWM. I needed better tray icon for free memory and coded an applet in C in a hour or so. Other WMs even those that claim being fast and lightweight feel sluggish and bloated to me. With IceWM you never wait for anything to load or start it's just instantaneous everywhere.

IceWM has five config files for: startup, menu, keyboard, preferences, taskbar they are very straight forward, only the preferences one needs learning because it has hundreds of options of which I only use a dozen or so tbf. One thing I would like it to have is grouping of multiple firefox windows under one tabbar entry, hope they will add it.

I remember it as one of my stepping stones into nix systems. I tried a huge number of window managers, DEs, all sorts of arrangements. IceWM stuck around on my computer for a bit but since I was a teenager it just didn’t look hackery enough. I wanted something more so I ended up with openbox, so minimalistic it’s all in lower case. I think it’s fun to experiment with how your environment works but eventually you need to get actual work done and the fun of setting up different environment fades a bit. Still, I am grateful to all those projects for getting me to mess around with my computer in yet another way.

I used to use icewm, it's okay. It's not particularly inspired, but there isn't anything wrong with it either. Right now I use cwm which I absolutely love, but have also heard very good things about i3.

After hearing good things about i3 for years, I made the somewhat steep learning curve switching to it in the office several years ago and have not looked back.

At home I still stayed with xfwm. Some variation between work and free time I guess :) However, with being at the office at most a couple of hours a week under current circumstances I notice that my muscle memory doesn't fully work any more. Reminds me of the steep learning curve in the beginning. No plans to give up though, maybe I should switch to i3 at home, too.

From reading the IceWM FAQ I see nothing that it would displace my i3.

I was inspired by the Hackers movie to pimp my laptop in the late 90s, early 2000s.

IceWM was a great candidate but I don't remember using it as much as Fluxbox or IonWM.

Of course I also modified the boot splash in FreeBSD to display the Duke Nukem nuclear logo when the computer started.

That scene in Hackers where all the kids setup their laptop in a phone booth and each of them opens up a customized laptop really stuck in my mind.

It gave me a fantastic sense of pride and belonging to a sub-culture everytime someone saw my custom laptop. :)

icewm used to be my wm, but it's been QUITE awhile. I wonder if it's time to try it again.

My first interaction with IceWM was in 2008 with Puppy Linux. It still amazes me how they were able to provide a full desktop in such a minimalist way.

Icewm+rox+volumeicon+wicd+udiskie=fastest DE for Linux, ever. On OpenBSD, tray-app and hotplug-diskmount will do the same.

What does it mean for a window manager to have audio support? Why is the WM messing with audio at all?

"icesound - play audio files when interesting GUI events happen". The full man page list all the details¹. Note that it is optional too, you don't have to enable MovieOS swooshing and zooming sounds to use icewm ;)

¹ https://ice-wm.org/man/icesound

does Enlightenment still exist ?

does Google still exist?

https://www.enlightenment.org/

Happy Holidays to you.

I believe some distros like Elive (https://www.elivecd.org/) still use E16 and are actively supported. Bodhi uses a fork of Enlightenment called Moksha too.

sway on disk encrypted, kernel hardened Arch wayland. It's the future.

I just installed it; Very colorful :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com