
You are the WM - vezzy-fnord
http://blog.z3bra.org/2015/01/you-are-the-wm.html?hn
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krupan
"You are the WM" until you automate everything with scripts as the author
seems to have done (because, why wouldn't you automate?). Then it's "You just
wrote your own WM, in bash."

I'm tempted to try this because it's just so UNIXy, but I probably have
"better" ("important" and less fun) things to spend time on.

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zeveb
Pretty neat idea, but I'm beginning to think that Greenspun's Eleventh Law
should be 'All powerful Unix environments will expand to include an ad-hoc,
informally-specified, bug-ridden subset of Plan 9.'

~~~
an_ko
Zeveb's Eleventh Law; you heard it here first.

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ims
I like minimalism, but IMO the closest you can get to this idea without
wasting time reinventing the wheel is a tiling windows manager. I have been
using i3 for about 3 years now and can't imagine going back.

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mdcox
Just switched to OSX for work, and i3 is the only part of my workflow I can't
replace. I dearly dearly miss it.

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rmurri
[http://www.hammerspoon.org/](http://www.hammerspoon.org/) allowed me to write
a small i3 replacement, it's not as complete, but it's mine

~~~
mintplant
Would you mind sharing your implementation? Even if it's messy, it would be
more helpful than nothing at all.

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catern
Initially I thought this was based on wmctrl[0] which is a nice piece of
software. It allows you to do some fancy window manager scripting in bash,
even when running GNOME Shell.

[0]: [http://linux.die.net/man/1/wmctrl](http://linux.die.net/man/1/wmctrl)

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bitwize
It's written against an obsolete windowing model for a deprecated window
system.

What's needed is a successor written as a Wayland compositor and tools that
communicate via a d-bus interface to instruct the compositor where to place
the windows.

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vezzy-fnord
_What 's needed is a successor written as a Wayland compositor and tools that
communicate via a d-bus interface to instruct the compositor where to place
the windows._

Poe's Law really has me here.

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userbinator
I think that's more like Poettering's Law.

~~~
dredmorbius
Hrm. "Poe" \+ "ttering".

"tering" is a Dutch word having meanings of "damnit" or "uncountable".

[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Tering](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Tering)!
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tering](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tering)

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JTxt
Handy.

In case this is useful to others:

I have to use Windows 7 at work. I recently found bug.n, a flexible tiling
window manager made with AutoHotkey.

[https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n](https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n)

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kbenson
Or you can just run FVWM2, and get everything offered here (including the fine
grain control), plus a bunch of goodies for theming, window decoration, window
buttons, pagers, virtual desktops, button panels, etc.

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halosghost
Okay, so I know I'm a little odd, but my immediate reaction to this:

“Oh snap! I should totally uninstall my WM!”

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mavhc
I'm not surprised people hate window managers when they all suck and don't
even have basic features RISC OS had in 1990

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cookiecaper
What features? I've never used RISC OS.

~~~
mavhc
Most importantly it doesn't have raise-on-click, which allows you to actually
use overlapping windows, because who has infinite screen space? Now you can
use overlapping windows drag and drop actually works, can't drop if the window
you just dragged from now covers it. So there's drag and drop load and save,
no save-as boxes.

Secondly window moving/resizing, 1. windows aren't full screen, 2. you can
drag the title bar with the 3rd mouse button to keep the z-order the same. 3.
if you try to drag to resize off the side of the screen, the window moves in
the opposite direction so it still gets bigger. 4. 3rd button click on a
scroll arrow goes in the opposite direction, 3rd button drag on a scroll bar
allows 2d movement.

Thirdly: No menu bars, everything is a pop up menu, an infinitely large Fitts
target. Also you can 3rd button click on a menu to keep it open so you can
select another menu option.

Fourthly: The taskbar shows applications, not windows, to open a new document
you click the taskbar icon. Drag to taskbar icon opens file in that
application, drag to a window on that application inserts/merges/etc.
Application level tasks on on the taskbar menu, quit, preferences. Document
level tasks are in the document menu.

Obviously this requires application support, can't do it with just an X11
window manager.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROX_Desktop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROX_Desktop)
uses some of the ideas, although the project seems dead.

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mcguire
Feh. If it doesn't have pie-shaped menus, it's lame.[1]

[1]
[http://www.crynwr.com/piewm/index.html~](http://www.crynwr.com/piewm/index.html~)

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trengrj
I'm a big fan of z3bra's posts. They focus on the unix way, minimalism, and
understand your tools.

Another good link is
[http://blog.z3bra.org/2014/03/toolbox.html](http://blog.z3bra.org/2014/03/toolbox.html)
where he describes some unusual but useful commands.

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nickpsecurity
A nice illustration of the UNIX philosophy applies to window managers. Also, a
nice illustration of why non-UNIX IPC or protected procedures are much more
efficient.

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teddyh
For less extreme cases, you can also use xwit(1).

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INTPenis
I was forced to be minimal 10 years ago with my laptop having 256M RAM. This
WM would have been my choice then. Instead I used Ion3 after trying my way
through many others like ratpoison, waimea and so forth.

But now I have 8-16G or more RAM in my computers. I also tend to have a nice
graphics chip, even if it's from Intel it's better than what I had 10 years
ago. So why bother with this type of minimalism if you don't need it?

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mcguire
I recently switched back to xmonad and then ratpoison because I'm more
interested in getting work done than watching the pretty animations.

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mahouse
I read VM in the title. Very disappointed.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
You certainly can be the VM on a microkernel which supports external pagers.

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cetra3
How does this compare to XMonad?

