Rubywm: An X11 window manager in pure Ruby | Hacker News Reader

Rubywm: An X11 window manager in pure Ruby

github.com

155 pointsKerrick31 comments

I'm the author. This was discussed on HN a year ago too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39087609

Note that the warnings still apply. I have used it continuously since, and there are a few bugs here and there but it mostly works for my use which is very basic, and does e.g. not involve more than a single monitor.

Build your own window manager in Python:

https://monroeclinton.com/build-your-own-window-manager/

By the way, it is much easier to develop and test these things using VNC, so running an X server in a separate window.

You can just use Xephyr or Xnest.

I know very little about window managers, but I know a bit about Ruby, so... Does this have any performance implications?

Nothing noticeable. X11 wm's receive high-level events, such as windows opening, closing etc., they're not in-band for anything computationally heavy unlike e.g. Wayland compositors.

I love seeing tiling window managers in unexpected languages as someone who is mostly know for maintaining a twm!

I recently also became aware of a tiling window manager written in Janet which I'm sure will be a hit with Emacs and lisp fans![1]

[1]: https://agentkilo.itch.io/jwno/devlog/871672/scroll-jwno-scr...

I think Emacs and Lisp fans will prefer EXWM or Stumpwm. Although I am an Emacs and Lisp fan, but I don't like tiling window managers so I use Awesome with all tags set to floating.

StumpWM supports both tiling and stacking windows. The latter are not great, but good enough when needed.

What a unexpected yet exciting project

Most of my Ruby use is unexpected ;) I don't like Rails, and while I do lots of web dev in Ruby, I think line for line I've written more non-web related Ruby code than web apps.

If you like it, note the X binding is also pure Ruby. Though incomplete it covers most of the important stuff, including enough of XRender to let my (pure Ruby, but translated from a C project) font renderer use it (not used by the wm, but used by my terminal; I really need to clean up the terminal enough to be comfortable pushing the current version of to Github)

This looks rad - I’m getting grumpy at i3 so I’d love to replace it.

Have you used it with multiple monitors by chance?

Thanks for sharing!

tl;dr "It currently does not do anything to facilitate working on multiple monitors, as in my current setup I'm only using a single monitor for my Linux machine."

I'm the author, and that's still true. I'd be open to addressing it, but it's not currently a priority for me to work on. I'm moving soon - if my new office gives me space for a second monitor that may change ;)

Two monitor life is a good life but it’s the part of my i3 config that’s most annoying. I guess idk exactly what I want but I know I don’t want to fiddle and fight with my i3 config lol

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Comparison_of_tiling_window...

You're spoilt for choice really...

Just as good a time as any to give Sway a try.

Wayland bugs out on my machine so it’s X11 for life (or at least maybe until I get a different GPU or something idk).

But isn’t sway a drop in replacement for i3? Or does it make life easier with some additional functionality or features?

Spoilt for the choice of which wm I want to invest a bunch of time figuring out.

Thanks for the link in any case, I just gotta spend some time one of these weekends getting whatever I end up using working smoothly

If you want tiling, but i3 requires too much manual work, you might like the more managed layouts that are the default in XMonad: https://xmonad.org/

XMonad works fine with multiple monitors. Each monitor displays one of the many virtual desktops. The normal keys for desktops and for windows work pretty intuitively with multiple monitors.

Or start from the start and give dwm a try.

I am not sure what you want out of I3, but if it is "i3 configuration is too complicated" might I suggest spectrwm. I like it because it hits that sweet spot for a tilling WM between "more configurable than dwm" and "less configurable than i3"

https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm

Plus I find it handles multiple monitors well.

Much appreciated, I’ll give it a look

I'm the author, and beware that it's still very much "raw". It's extremely minimalist, and I've not even tried to make it feature-complete, that includes not even testing on multiple monitors.

It is the wm I use daily, but I also know where to look if it crashes or otherwise misbehaves.

It definitely has bugs - there's something Chrome does when the file open dialog window opens that makes it sometimes fail to refresh unless I resize it that I haven't bothered tracking down, for example.

Also to add that personally, I moved from i3 to bspwm first, and you might be happier with bspwm than mine in its current state (but thoughtful PR's are welcome)

I had basically two motivations to write my own: 1) because I could, 2) because bspwm - at least at the time had a couple of quirks I disliked: a) if I ran a file manager, it'd open on all the desktops, b) it took a hack that wasn't very satisfying to get one desktop to be floating while the others were tiled. Those were minor, and so if I hadn't already been working on extending X11 bindings for Ruby for my other Ruby projects I probably would've stayed on bspwm, but since my usage was also very simple, I figured I'd see how long I'd last, and I got close enough within a few days to decide it was viable to keep using my own instead of trying to fix bspwm.

My tolerance level for weird quirks that I'm in control of is very high, though. It feels very different when its your own bugs :)

> My tolerance level for weird quirks that I'm in control of is very high, though.

Likewise for me and the idea that I could hack at it in Ruby is making trying it out very tempting. If I test it on multiple monitors I’ll let ya know if it works and if it doesn’t I might try to find time on the weekends to work it out and submit a patch.

I’m basically committed to not using Wayland so it wouldn’t hurt me to learn more about how X11 actually works lol.

Thanks for your thorough and thoughtful reply!

Sounds great. If you have any questions, my contact details are in my HN profile.

Have you tried awesomewm? Tbh I never really understood why i3 is so popular and few people seem to mention awesome.

I first tried awesomewm the last time I wiped and reinstalled a new Linux and it crashed my X session. I gave it an hour or so and reluctantly went back to i3. Maybe I should give it another look :)

Diabolical.

X11 Ruby manager choices are contributing disproportionately to climate change

it was sarcasm

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