Slate – A Hacker’s Window Manager | Hacker News Reader

Slate – A Hacker’s Window Manager

usepanda.com

14 pointsdrt9 comments

This post talks about slate without offering a single clear example of 'how' it is better than spectacle or others... JavaScript- great. But what can you do with it?

Then when you follow usepanda the same poster has made 3 posts in the last 3 weeks where he extols the virtues of he other 2 window managers he mentions, spectacle etc.

What is it? One better than the other? An honest opinion? Or some gameification of search engine results?

This sort of thing interests me, but as far as presentation goes, those terminal gifs seem pointless and annoying.

I don't like to gravitate towards negativity but I'm trying to see what the .slate.js file looks like and it keeps flicking back to typing `vim .slate.js` in the terminal. The question I ask is... why do this?

I would have loved it if the gif was a demo that actually showed slate being used in some fashion, not just demonstrating vim's ability to open a text file.

This was the only video of Slate I could find on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL-54xTgLO0

This looks like a really bad post.

I don't think this is what a window manager is:

> For those of you who are unfamiliar with what a window manager is, it’s a way to snap individual windows into sections on your screen.

A window manager is a software that manages your windows for you. It need not necessarily 'snap' them. It can position your window according to however it pleases. It is also responsible for transferring the control between windows and providing window decorations and other controls to the user.

This I believe is in the X11 context. Could somebody with a Mac expand on if this is the case on the apple computers too?

On OS X the window manager is built-in and not really customizable. That's also the reason why you need extra tools on OS X to get something like i3 or xmonad.

I've used Slate for 2 years. Slate hasn't had an update in 2 years. It was supposed to be replaced by Zephyros, no Phoenix, no Hydra, no Mjolnir, no ...

Despite the lack of updates, Slate is what I still use to this day. It still works, and it does the job well.

Seems to me that the Phoenix/Hydra/Mjolnir guy has moved past window management to a much more general problem space that I don't particularly find interesting or useful (also, come on, lua is lovely in concept and I'm sure superior to JS in uncountable ways, but FFS, we all know JS and if I'm going to get up to speed on a new language, it's going to be for an actual programming project, not something silly like configuring a window manager). However, Phoenix got picked up by a new maintainer and seems like the best of the bunch at the moment. It's what I use.

As a maintainer of a Mjolnir fork (Hammerspoon), I take your point that there are very many options in this space, but IMO that can be a good thing - lots of exploring in different directions can help us figure out what works well for people :)

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