
30 Window Managers in 30 Days - randallsquared
http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=18273
======
guylhem
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...](http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/8728/Toshiba-
Satellite-110CS-810/))

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...](http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=310500#p310500)
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.

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

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

~~~
agumonkey
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.

~~~
guylhem
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.

~~~
agumonkey
this would be adequate specs to run dev VMs though

------
kunai
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](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.

~~~
pjmlp
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.

~~~
kunai
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.

------
arocks
In case you are wondering too, the author finally chose musca as his default
WM:
[http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=206350#p20635...](http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=206350#p206350)

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

1\.
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Musca](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Musca)

~~~
swdunlop
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.

~~~
2ManyDogs
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.

~~~
kbenson
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.

------
mkhattab
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.

~~~
gizmo686
I use Awesome with multiple monitors and have never noticed any difficulty.
What does i3 do differently?

~~~
mkhattab
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.

------
Touche
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...

~~~
tikhonj
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.

~~~
ics
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.

~~~
X-Istence
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.

~~~
ics
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
:)

------
Shish2k
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](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)

~~~
replax
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. :)

~~~
2ManyDogs
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!

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

~~~
Zardoz84
In my case, was twm, fwvm, fwvm95, kde , gnome 1.0 ... was SuSE 6.12 in the
1998's

~~~
pjmlp
Slackware 2.0 in 1995.

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

------
rsync
ion3, ftw, after all these years.

~~~
codemac
Has anyone kept up with notion development?

~~~
dima55
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

~~~
mcginleyr1
Wow I thought I was the only person still loving ion3 and notion. Notion has a
few nice updates. Needs much more love.

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

------
lcedp
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.

------
D9u
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/](http://xwinman.org/) site is all I had to go on when I
did my own WM search.

~~~
2ManyDogs
Thank you. Someone who isn't complaining that I didn't feature their favorite
WM. :)

------
hmsimha
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.

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jensenbox
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.

~~~
D9u
The site loads for me...

~~~
jensenbox
I should have been more specific...

Their repo is under DDoS

[http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=339366#p33936...](http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=339366#p339366)

~~~
2ManyDogs
There have been several responses to your requests to move to cloudflare. You
have ignored them.

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

