Ask HN: Which Tiling Window Manager do you use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which Tiling Window Manager do you use?

I've considering i3, xmonad, awesome, spectrewm, and any others you're willing to suggest.

I wrote Zephyros[1] for Mac OS X, which is scriptable in pretty much any language, and used that for a while.

Eventually my OCD kicked in about the performance of Zephyros's server/client architecture on my laptop, so I forked it as Phoenix[2], which is only scriptable via an embedded JavaScript VM. Now I use Phoenix exclusively.

Here's my current tiling config[3] for Phoenix.

But I'm currently trying to make the transition from Mac OS X to Windows 8. So I plan to port Phoenix to Windows, and I'm naming it ZephSharp[4] (I'm terrible at naming things). It's going to be written in C#, which fortunately has ClojureCLR, so Clojure will be its scripting language instead of JavaScript (hoorah!).

[1]: https://github.com/sdegutis/zephyros

[2]: https://github.com/sdegutis/phoenix

[3]: https://gist.github.com/sdegutis/7756583

[4]: https://github.com/sdegutis/zephsharp -- Nota bene, it's not even close to working, I've only spent a few hours prototyping some basic hard-coded stuff, so beware!

It doesn't quite count as a tiling window manager, but I just use compiz with the grid plugin, and it gets me everything I wanted from a tiling window manager without losing the ability to move a window around freely occasionally. That plus the cube, no window decoration (that really helps clean things up), and some convenient keyboard/mouse shortcuts makes for a really efficient desktop without the restrictions of a pure tiling window manager.

I tend to like i3. But all the cool kids on arch are using herbstluft.

To me, Haskell and Lua are turn-offs so xmonad and awesome are out. I don't want to have to learn a programming language to configure my window manager. Straight up well documented C and old school configuration files are the way to go. Plus the tutorial/intro video gets you going quickly.

I've never heard of herbstluft. What makes all the cool arch kids drawn to it? (the fact I've never heard of it?)

One thing that's interestingly unixy about it is that all configuration/interaction is done via a CLI program, herbstclient, which interacts with herbstserver, rather than via config files or an embedded scripting language. So config and scripting is then typically done via a bash script, or whatever other way you prefer to call a series of herbstclient commands.

Otherwise its UI model is fairly typical for "manual" (i.e. not auto-layout) tiling WMs.

Heavily use xmonad.

I have a single xmobar on my primary screen showing active workspaces, max cpu using process, max memory using process, cpu usage / throttling and network traffic.

I do a lot of work across multiple VMs (OSX on vmware, multiple Windows boxes on virtualbox). Having OSX running XCode full screen on one workspace, Windows 7 running Visual Studio full screen on another, Android Eclipse open on another workspace, and Vim open editing some back end server code on another workspace is invaluable.

    Meta-V Start Fullscreen Windows VM
    Meta-O Start Fullscreen OSX
    Meta-C Start Google Chrome
    Meta-E Start Android Eclipse
    Alt-Shift-Return Start Gnome terminal
    Alt-Shift-N Start a new Gnome terminal in the current Gnome terminal's working directory

I use dwm with dmenu on arch. The configuration is in C and it's incredibly lightweight.

[1]http://suckless.org/

As a corollary question, does anyone use Tiling Window Managers on Windows? Is the one you use good?

I've been using bug.n[1], but my experience has been subpar due to it's bugginess (namely due to applications such as various terminal applications such as cmd/Console2/cmder refusing to re-size themselves properly).

[1] https://code.google.com/p/bugn/

It depends on what you'd like I suppose. If you want highly a configurable WM then xmonad is great (I can't speak for the rest). If you want something very simple with limited configuration but which allows you to quickly use it then scrotwm.

You can find a lot of configs for xmonad/awesome/otherwm on github which you can then copy and adapt to your liking.

I've tried xmonad, awesome, i3, dwm, herbsluftwm, ratpoison, etc. My favorite was dwm for a few years, then I moved up to i3 because of multi-monitor support. I see i3 as a good medium between the really minimal <2k lines tiling managers and the larger ones like awesomewm.

I use bluetile, as it is a middle-ground between the default GNOME window-manager and a full tiling experience.

As things stand I'm not likely to change any-time soon, because it does work the way I'd expect it to.

If you want some inspiration: http://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/top/?sort=top&t=year

Awesome was my introduction to tiling WMs, then I went to xmonad for years, and I recently moved over to dwm as I realized suckless had taken over the rest of my machine so why not.

I'm using dwm with the flextile and systray patches.

+1 for dwm. It's <2k lines, so it's easy to modify, and it's really simple, so it's easy to get started with.

I use awesome from 2008. It's doing just two thing: order windows and start console. But it's exactly what I need.

dwm with pertag and systray patches, and also I've changed active window border color to red.

stumpwm. It's the sequel to ratpoison, implemented in common lisp. You can hack while it's running. The multi-monitor support is top notch. http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/

dwm.

[1] http://dwm.suckless.org/

SizeUp on Mac OS X.

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