30 Window Managers in 30 Days | Hacker News Reader

30 Window Managers in 30 Days

crunchbang.org

116 pointsrandallsquared64 comments

Glad to see some people are still using AfterStep. We put a lot of work into that - it was running just fine on my Toshiba 110CS, the main devel computer I used back in 2001 (and it was dated even back then - http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/8728/Toshiba-Satellit...)

It was really fast and optimized back then. It should be blazing fast on modern hardware.

EDIT - the review on http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=310500#p31050... mentions a slow start. Weird. It was globally as fast as fvwm and fvwm2, unless one started too many modules. I remember because I used them as benchmarks.

It was my window manager around 1997-99.

100MHz Pentium, what a nice constraint to work with.

Why is chrissmeuk's reply to you [dead], I wonder?

I don't know HN enough to guess, I was surprised too since it's dead but not removed so it asks for replies but (at least) I can't do that. I upvoted it in case it just needed to be in the positive, with no visible effect. Maybe he trolled on another thread and was punished ...

anyway @chrissmeuk I understand pentium 100 are nice little cpus, I used a p2 350 for a loooong time, and I miss it a great deal since it was a real workhorse. And to clarify my first comment, I wish more people were programming on old machines, it's a good thing to avoid bloat.

Indeed, working on a slow machine is the best thing one can do to produce optimized code.

At the moment I'm using a macbookair3.1 with 4 gigs of ram- and it might even be too fast IMHO to add good constaints.

this would be adequate specs to run dev VMs though

chrissmeuk has a pretty innocuous (and short) comment history (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=chrissmeuk). The only visible clue is that someone accused them of being a Microsoft shill, and maybe someone pulled out the hellban hammer in response. There's clearly something fishy going on, on one side or another.

I've been browsing with showdead on for a while now and more and more I see quite reasonable-looking posts that have become [dead].

My hypothesis is a little more charitable: people just get caught by some semi-automatic filter and get accidentally hellbanned. Which is still a problem.

Then I post and hardly ever get responses or upvotes, which makes me wonder if:

a) I'm hellbanned myself

b) I'm a victim of my timezone

c) My writing is not as useful as I think

a) you're alive in my world (or maybe we're both hellbanned and it's hidden from us) b,c) combination of both. Internet is chaotic, I submitted nice links that had <10 votes and no comments, while a trivial one about a cute css button got 500+ ...

My read on AfterStep was that it was a wrapper / based on fvwm, is that accurate?

I tried it but found WindowMaker more internally consistent. In fact, I'm still using it, some 16 years later.

It was based on fvwm code, but it evolved independently.

What was good is that it enabled fvwm modules to be ported very easily.

Good memories from a long time ago (started doing that in 1997 ... wow! cf http://www.afterstep.org/visualdoc.php?show=copyright&sub=ol...)

Awww... no WindowMaker.

This is one of the things that made me switch back to Linux from OS X. Inspired by this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6270254 I started running #! on a Tecra M2, and I now switch between the standard OpenBox config and dwm pretty constantly. The sheer feeling of freedom that you get from not being limited by a proprietary system where configuration is discouraged is one of the best parts of Linux and free software.

In all honesty though, dwm, awesome, and i3 are probably my favorite picks for minimalism. There's just nothing that comes close to a hybrid/tiling WM in terms of efficiency.

It's like vim. You don't ever realize how awful using the arrow keys and Ctrl-whatever was until you've tried HJKL and the massive amount of keybindings in vim, along with the endless configurability of your .vimrc.

Floating WMs are convenient, but tiling WMs are just quality. On a 1024x768 screen, they save so much space that you never thought you needed.

WindowMaker was quite nice, specially the docklets.

It replaced AfterStep for me (around 1999) and I used it mainly until 2004.

Nowadays I just use whatever is the default in any OS I use, as I no longer have the patient to tinker with settings.

Gnome 3 is turning out to be the best DE on any platform. It's by far the most polished and innovative I've seen.

I never thought I'd say that 3 years ago.

WindowMaker was quite nice

Hey! It's not dead yet!

(Entered from my WindowMaker desktop). Development's even restarted in the past year or so, after being on hiatus (other than bug support) since ~2005.

In case you are wondering too, the author finally chose musca as his default WM: http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=206350#p20635...

According to this[1], musca development halted since 2009.

1. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Musca

That is not a bad thing in a window manager for people wanting an environment with few surprises. Openbox's development has been idle for years, but it where I go every time after I get bored with fighting GNOME3 or E17 on a new Linux install.

Exactly. People like to point out that older window managers aren't in active development, as if this was a bad thing. To me it just means the WM is stable and doesn't need bug fixes.

I've been migrating my Fvwm2 config (with alterations) for over a decade now. Whenever I see a new feature that's actually useful and not window dressing (ha), I generally spend a few hours to try to implement it, or my take on it. Generally, this works best when you combine it's scripting with external utilities. In this respect, it's the bash of window managers.

Surprisingly, I've actually had people be genuinely surprised as some of the simpler things, such as binding the mail key on the dell keyboard I was using to slide toggle Thunderbird in and out of view (move from off-screen on right to 90% of current screen), regardless of which desktop I'm on.

Every time I use a tiling WM I think to myself "This would be incredible if I only used terminals and minimalist X apps (like xclock)". But the problem is web browsers feel extremely out of place in a tiling WM and I need web browsers so...

Both Chrome and Firefox run in a single window which you can focus full screen if you want, what's the problem?

If there is a complaint about tiling window managers it's that applications like Inkscape or Gimp which have tons of floating windows tend to not render well. Though most WMs have solutions to this.

Why do web browsers feel out of place? When I'm using a web browser, it's almost always either taking up a whole screen or exactly half of one--it may as well be tiled already! So when I switched to XMonad, using browsers still felt very natural.

Perhaps it's just a cosmetic issue? For example, if you're using Chrome, you have to configure it to use system borders--otherwise it just looks wrong. I also set my Firefox up to be much more minimalistic, which looks much better with a tiling WM.

Could you share any details about your setup?

I didn't really do much customization. For FireFox, I just used a different theme and got rid of all the UI bits I didn't use. For Chrome, I only set it to use system borders. I didn't even configure XMonad very much--the defaults are very well thought out.

In practice, it looks like this:

Firefox: http://jelv.is/xmonad-ff.png Chrome: http://jelv.is/xmonad-chrome.png Tiled: http://jelv.is/xmonad-tiled.png

The only real problem I've had is that form widgets are rather ugly. I think this should be easy enough to change, I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

Completely agree– I absolutely love having my browser tiled. Every time I look up and realize I'm still in OS X and can't split my browser window something twitches and I contemplate booting up a VM so it doesn't happen again while I'm in the zone. I'd also be interested in seeing what modifications you've made though– I don't think I configured very much and even though I don't use Chrom(ium) as my primary browser I never really took issue with the way it looked. In Firefox I just hide everything and use Pentadactyl.

Take a look at ShiftIt, it's a Mac application that gives you keyboard shortcuts to move windows around. I absolutely love it, so I get to keep my OS X while having some of the features I miss from tiling window managers.

Divvy's another good one for this, and you can define your own regions. Maybe this is possible with ShiftIt too?

http://mizage.com/divvy/

I use Zephyros now (after going full neckbeard with my Slate config) but until I spend more time with the configuration it's still a couple extra keystrokes where in Xmonad I'd have already handled it. But at least we have some choices :)

GTK look hideous in every tiling am I've tried. Xterm, xvclock, etc look gorgeous in that setting.

You have to manually set the gtk theme you want because you don't have a desktop environment to set it for you.

The i3 window manager and a full-screen browser on one display works really well, in my experience. Shuffling it or other things to the other display is easy, as well. I'd liked the idea of tiling WMs, but the ones I tried all seemed clumsy until I happened upon i3, and it was like coming home: 90% of the defaults were exactly what I would have picked, and all the others were easily configurable in a text file.

Try a more minimalistic one like uzbl or w3m.

I only use terminals and browser windows and have been using a tiling WM for years.

Granted I don't use the hyper complex layout you see in some screenshots around the web (Actually I don't know if someone really use those or if it's just for show)

I mainly split my screens into two or three parts. Using a tilling WM for this use case is perfect because I don't have to spend time resizing and moving my windows to take half the screen each time.

Great list, although like most tools the full experience comes after spending a great deal of time tinkering with it. Two of my favorites on that list are awm (Awesome) and i3. I started with awm after using the mess that is Unity (Ubuntu) then switched to OSX. Then I started missing tiling window managers, so I started using spectacle, which is great. Recently my SSD failed on my MBA so I switched to Ubuntu and to the even greater mess than before, Unity. Apparently one needs SLI/Crossfire to get acceptable performance in Unity. So, I switched back awm which is still great but shit when it comes to multi-monitor support out of the box. Finally switched to i3. Moral of the story is one should use what works best for him/her as long as it's not Unity.

I use Awesome with multiple monitors and have never noticed any difficulty. What does i3 do differently?

i3 will use different workspaces for each monitor. So if you have dual monitors by default, the primary monitor will be workspace 1 and the secondary will be workspace 2. Workspaces are created and destroyed as needed, that is they're existing only when windows are attached.

One problem I had with Awesome is that sometimes pop ups from Chrome on one monitor would end up on another. I also had trouble switching focus between dual monitors. As a result, I would need to use my mouse. i3 multi-monitor support is more seamless compared to Awesome.

After thinking about WMs for a while, I ended up realising that basically what I want is Eclipse ( http://shimmie.shishnet.org/v2/post/view/3171 ) -- specifically, a tiled WM with arbitrary nesting of "vertical split", "horizontal split" and "tabbed" containers, and mouse support for re-arranging the windows. i3 comes so very, very close; but no mouse support :( (I know keyboards are better for most things, but they aren't better for all things; I'd like to be able to use both as appropriate)

Come to think of it, tmux uses that model too, with quite a lot of popularity, so it's not like it's a completely unknown style...

Anyone know of any X WMs that do it though? Bonus points for having independent desktops for each monitor, and also for keeping up with modern standards (compositing, that dbus-based systray protocol that I forget the name of, etc)

Hi! i think awesome wm, yes that's the name (and it also is awesome) comes close to your needs. actually, i can't believe that they did not test it. it's really popular in arch linux circles. :)

I did mention awesome, but it's so configurable I couldn't do it justice in a day (plus I don't really like it, partly because it's so configurable -- I prefer minimal WMs that stay out of my way).

On-topic, wmfs2 also has mouse-moveable splits and tabbed containers, and herbstluftwm has both manual tiling and automatic tiling modes. There are many WMs out there that might meet your requirements -- try a few!

On my first GNU/Linux distribution I could only choose between twm, fwvm and OpenLook, boy am I old!

In my case, was twm, fwvm, fwvm95, kde , gnome 1.0 ... was SuSE 6.12 in the 1998's

Slackware 2.0 in 1995.

twm actually works quite well if you configure it to suit your needs.

Well, when I saw twm for the first time, I already knew RiscOS, Atari ST GEM, Amiga Workbench, OS/2 PM, Desqview, Geoworks, Windows 3.x, Mac OS.

So I wasn't that much impressed.

On a vaguely related note, Benedict Cumberbatch appears to use DWM in The Fifth Estate: http://i.imgur.com/1Ytwr5t.png

ion3, ftw, after all these years.

Has anyone kept up with notion development?

I use notion, and will be for the foreseeable future. I suspect the article skipped it because it's in nonfree on Debian. This is due to Tuomo's funny licensing, and I don't think putting it there is fully justified, TBH. As for the development, there have been various bug fixes and some minor feature updates. It was and still is a fantastic WM

Wow I thought I was the only person still loving ion3 and notion. Notion has a few nice updates. Needs much more love.

Count one more - I also use it all the time when working under Linux. Haven't found anything close to it.

Nothing much [1] but it works fine. I use it everyday.

[1] http://notion.sourceforge.net/#changes

Yup, I've used ion2 → ion3 → notion pretty much exclusively for 10 or 11 years now. I don't think I could switch to another wm for my main interface if I wanted to. But why would I want to? Gimp was the only slightly-annoying thing, and now that has a single-window mode.

I have only one feature request that I haven't figured out how to do myself: I want to hide the status bar (mod_statusbar) on certain workspaces (the ones that have a full-screen browser). Anyone have any ideas?

Yep. It's remarkably stable and gets so many things right. I recommended it in my recent post on why you should try a tiling window manager:

http://adereth.github.io/blog/2013/10/02/why-you-should-try-...

One day per manager is nearly not enough for some managers to grok. Personally I recommend going with i3 - it's easier then average tiled WM to configure, but still some time should be spent to choose behavior options and compose your ultimate statusbar.

I noticed a couple of my favorites. Pekwm, and dwm.

I wish that someone had done this list a few years ago, as the http://xwinman.org/ site is all I had to go on when I did my own WM search.

Thank you. Someone who isn't complaining that I didn't feature their favorite WM. :)

dwm needs their documentation fixed. Not all of the keybindings are documented on the suckless webpage, and this has undoubtedly prevented many (including the author of this article) from realizing how easy it is to jump in without having to mod it.

Alt+I and Alt+D increment and decrement the number of windows in the master area, on the left by default.

Alt+L and Alt+H increase and decrease the width of the master area respectively.

Alt+J and Alt+K move focus to new windows.

And alt+enter switches the position of a focused window with an unfocused one.

It's incredibly easy and fun to be able to do all your window management from the keyboard, and dwm will run much more responsively on slightly older computers.

These guys have been under a DDoS for days now. I have tried to get them to flip over to Cloudflare but no response. Even now, their forum is getting a HNDoS.

The site loads for me...

I should have been more specific...

Their repo is under DDoS

http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=339366#p33936...

There have been several responses to your requests to move to cloudflare. You have ignored them.

No one mentioned qtile. It is written in Python, tiling WM and very simple to use.

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