The Antidesktop (2002)

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44 points·vikrum··7 comments

Dang, it's been a while since I've used Ratpoison. I'm on EXWM now, but I really enjoyed using StumpWM, which is a spiritual successor to Ratpoison, and it's written in Lisp.

I tried rat-poison and similar, tiling WMs are my style, but I'm spoiled by the intuitiveness of i3WM... no doubt If I started earlier when it wasn't around, I'd probably be using ratpoison or similar now.

I do love how the "desktop" just completely dissolves away with these WMs, none of the visual facade, distraction and waste, it feels like they are the most minimal possible layer between you and laying out a bunch of terminals exactly how you want them... while also laying out things that are unfortunately not terminals :D

I think i3wm might be the reason why every time I interact with some other user interface I feel like saying "just get out of the frickin way and show me the stuff".

It's amazing to see the development of tiling ideas on X11. Ratpoison, sure. wmii, dwm, i3, scrotwm....

Now it seems like we mostly have settled on i3, I do sometimes miss autotiling, scrotwm specifically, but I do like that we sort of 'solved' tiling.

i used scrotwm around decade ago. it was my gateway drug to useless linux desktop shenanigans.

What is autotiling?

dwm and other WMs will automatically pick the layout for you based on number of windows. Sometimes it's a set of squares, fibonacci, etc. i3 and their ilk use manual tiling.

Before I stopped using X11 completely, I used evilwm. It gets a mention in the comments.

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