4 ms·
I love the ideal of keeping things simple. I did my first steps in C studying dwm code and making my own window manager. That said, simplicity can obviously be
by jstimpfle 11y ago
I love the ideal of keeping things simple. I did my first steps in C studying dwm code and making my own window manager.
That said, simplicity can obviously be taken too far. These tools do not enough to be usable in practice.
Why would I want a binary which does nothing besides warping the X11 pointer? At least do a little more, like xwit. (not that I've used either)
dwm also turned out to be impractical for me. Didn't work well for some applications like Gimp. Tiling terminals I also find impractical because I like them to be a certain size (80 columns) and that's not supported by tiling. The most important wm action for me is switching and rotating between 2-3 windows (simultaneously visible _as much as possible_). Stacked windows and Alt-Tab turn out to be better at that kind of thing.
Just tried that "sent" tool which I find nice and kind-of-usable. But so many lines of C. And a hand-rolled UTF-8 parser which discards text silently after decoding errors. Couldn't that be hacked in Python as a much shorter throw away script? Extreme portability is bogus if the software can be replaced in a few hours work. Plus, if you neglect to use higher-level libraries and tie yourself to low-level POSIX and X11, portability actually suffers.
- Absentinsomniac 11y agoI use dwm with gimp, it is a little bit of a pain but I'm pretty used to it at this point so for me it's usable. Granted I don't need to do anything in depth.
- userbinator 11y agobecause I like them to be a certain size This was the biggest annoyance when I (briefly) tried a tiling WM - they are definitely not for those who like resizing windows independently and overlapping them so as to show only the relevant bits without having to resize.
- jadyoyster 11y agoIn case you ever want to try one again; dwm most definitely supports resizing windows independently and floating them. See http://dwm.suckless.org/dynamic_window_management http://dwm.suckless.org/dynamic_window_management.
- jstimpfle 11y agoIt was tedious last time I tried because you had to remember what windows are tiled and what floated and explicitly switch between the layers. And only rotating was supported, not Alt-Tab style LRU switching. Alt-Tab works the best for the most common case of 2 "hot" windows because you don't have to remember the order of the windows regarding rotation.