9 ms·

The Comprehensive List of Window Managers for Unix

106 points by memorable 4y ago

mikecoles 4y ago
Comprehensive is an accurate adjective. I occasionally try out different WM / DEs and always end up back at enlightenment. There are plenty on the list I've missed before. When I had a 3D monitor, I wanted to try a 3D WM. I didn't in getting one to run.
- nobleach 4y ago
  From the beginning, there has never been a cooler WM than Enlightenment. It brings back such great nostalgic memories of tweaking it for hours. Running CD ripping stuff, a Perl script for grabbing album artwork, and LAME encoding was my typical jam in 1998. In those days, I think I was running it on top of Gnome or something. These days, I've installed it a few times but, I've gotten old. I now am in the Honda Accord phase of life... so I just use whatever Gnome release is the latest.
- jyrkesh 4y ago
  I loved back in my Slackware/Gentoo days. But the last time I tried to run Linux on the desktop (on bare metal, in particular), I wanted to play with CentOS (just before the big changes). I ended up having to compile it from scratch, when was a fun challenge given that I was used to everything but RHEL-based distros. But a bunch of stuff was broken, and it was clear that Enlightenment had tried to reimplement a bunch of apps a la KDE/Gnome, and that development had stalled out. And that running a complex WM like that without a blessing from your package manager was a pain in the ass. So I installed GNOME. Nowadays, I just run Windows...
LAC-Tech 4y ago
Had a linux break due to the hardware I was using, but now have i3 as my "daily driver". I both like and dislike tiling windows. It's nice having stuff automatically take up non-overlapping space on the screen when you spawn new apps... but this doesn't scale. Even on a 32" monitor I almost never have any more than 3 windows. Which means I end up having way too many workspaces (aka "virtual desktops") to compensate. I remember using openbox back in the day, I've set aside some time to try it out again - a long with a new panel (would be a serious faux pas to use i3bar with openbox).
- nobleach 4y ago
  You see a lot of beautiful setups with i3 or BSPWM on /r/unixporn. I did use i3 for a solid year but... it's just not for me. I loved being able to navigate everything with the keyboard but, honestly, sometimes I just want overlapping windows (yes that's actually achievable with i3 - but it's kinda hacky)
  - 3np 4y ago
    If you haven't checked out gnome-shell already, maybe that's something for you.
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  It's less hassle to change between more workspaces with few applications and one keybinding to select them than to switch between fewer workspaces and then alt tab or what have you between stacked applications.
  - LAC-Tech 4y ago
    It's literally the same amount of keypresses.
    - Jenk 4y ago
      It's literally not. If you have 10 windows open that's up to 9 presses of alt+tab. With workspaces it's one press of whatever you have configured for the workspace, such as alt+1 (or 2 or 3, etc)
      - LAC-Tech 4y ago
        True, switching to workspace allows you to omit some keypresses since you immediately get to a smaller bucket of windows. But then once you get the workspace you want, more keypresses are to get it in focus.
        4y ago
layer8 4y ago
Thought #1: WMs are obviously much too easy to write. Thought #2: How about a meta window manager to run all those WMs in parallel and/or switch between them on the fly?
- zajio1am 4y ago
  You can switch WMs on the fly, just terminate one and start another. X server and applications survive restarting/switching WMs.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
    What command do you use for this? kill $pid && openbox doesn’t work for me.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  As sibling comment notes, you can switch between WMs at runtime, you just have to not exec the wm from xinitrc. Instead, you run a terminal emulator or whatever as the first X client, and then from there run the window manager like a normal program. I mean, I'm sure there are nicer ways to do it, but that worked for me. Alternatively, if you want to run multiple at once, you can run Xephyr, which nests X sessions, and then you just run whatever clients you want in each child X server, including the window manager.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
    Any way of achieving this without opening a terminal? Presumably closing the terminal kills the WM?
    - dizhn 4y ago
      CTRL+ALT plus function keys to go to a console tty.
wrp 4y ago
About 15 years ago or so, I tried out just about every window manager on Linux I could find. I don't have any notes, but I recall that the majority of them were unstable. For anyone using this listing to find some WMs to try, comments on the stability of each would be very helpful.
mateuszf 4y ago
ion <3
forinti 4y ago
One useful feature of X is that you can start a GUI without a window manager. It's quite practical for a public kiosk.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  This is true, but you still have to position the window on the screen, you just end up doing it manually by forcing exact pixel coordinates. IME it's annoying enough then I'm surprised nobody's made... "fullscreenwm", a <1KB executable or perhaps even shell script that fullscreens the only window on the screen and then blocks forever. Or perhaps it exists or is such a trivial application of some window manipulation command line utility that it's unnecessary and I just haven't heard of it.
  - forgotpwd16 4y ago
    xdotool getactivewindow windowmove 0 0 windowsize 100% 100% should work. At least for the fullscreens the only window part.
  - gandalfff 4y ago
    You might like nullWM. https://github.com/DebianJoe/nullWM https://github.com/DebianJoe/nullWM
- Arnavion 4y ago
  For Wayland the cage compositor does the same thing.
pengaru 4y ago
Glad to see my window manager hasn't made the cut, the last thing I need is users...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jhgb 4y ago
  > the last thing I need is users The Window Manager in the Glade? https://jaracimrman.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/pub-in-the-gladeprose1.pdf https://jaracimrman.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/pub-in-the-g... > The lawyer explained that my grandfather had been a notorious loner. He steered clear of everyone and couldn’t stand being near people. But as far back as anyone could remember he’d always longed to have his own pub. At first he opened a pub by the road to Písek. But people showed up. Then he rented a place on the square in Opočna, but they showed up there, too. And so he built this place.
nicklaf 4y ago
The tiling window manager I finally settled on is simply dwm. I'm not totally sure if it's the best window manager of its sort. I find it more ergonomic than StumpWM, and I haven't felt the need to reach for the other tiling window managers out there. A couple brilliant strokes in dwm are the alt-tab mechanism for swapping between workspaces rather than windows, and the idea that workspaces are actually just groups of windows which can be arbitrarily composed: more than one workspace can be selected at a time. In fact, alt-tabbing doesn't even swap individual workspace selections, but instead toggles back to the last such arbitrary group of selected workspaces. It's quite flexible and is under 2000 SLOC of C.
- grawp 4y ago
  The main feature that you've described is called (usually) 'tags' (windows have one or more tags and workspaces/viewports also have tags and a viewport displays all windows which have at least one of the viewport's tags). It is concept not specific to DWM at all and is much much older than it. Actually i3 and Sway feel like a big big regression in not suporting this concept even though they are so called manual tillers. Biggest disadwantages of DWM are: That it does not have any normal plugin/extension/IPC mechansim. Applying patches to add features is not sustainable and yield conflicts. So much for flexibility. Also it is not a wayland compositor.
- ninjin 4y ago
  I finally settled for dwm too nearly a year ago and I really can not emphasise how big of a deal the ~2,000 SLOC of code really is. It allows you to read it all in about an hour and once you have done that you will be “elevated” from user to developer. Now instead of desperately combing through manuals and guides with a fine comb you will just go “I could implement that…” now and then, which has been a game changer in terms of how I view software. Another commenter mentioned the lack of an extension framework and that applying patches could lead to conflicts, but I think this misses a bigger point. If you find yourself applying a ton of patches, just stop, dwm is supposed to be about minimalism and frugality, do you really need those features? I am very happy and productive with three patches: statusallmons [1] (~5 SLOC), warp [2] (~10 SLOC), and my own not-yet-public Fibonacci-style layout algorithm with a bit more features to support multi-head setups nicely (~90 SLOC). That is it! Keeping it simple may have seemed madness to me a year ago, but I think I now “get it” in terms of the freedom it brings through lower complexity, greater understanding, and thus ultimately hackability. [1]: https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/statusallmons https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/statusallmons [2]: https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/warp https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/warp Look at warp for a genius example of dwm simplicity. Other WMs will track the mouse pointer on a per-display basis and I was tempted to implement this for dwm, but then I tried the warp patch which is stupidly simple: move the mouse pointer to the centre of the currently focused window if it is not already inside it. No need for state and together with xbanish [3] you will always know where the mouse pointer is, yet it will not interfere with you while you work. ~10 SLOC, yet so incredibly powerful because it managed to take a novel stab at the heart of a problem. [3]: https://github.com/jcs/xbanish https://github.com/jcs/xbanish
pabs3 4y ago
Another window manager list site: http://www.xwinman.org/ http://www.xwinman.org/
esamueljohnson 4y ago
Openbox is not 'abandoned'. It is considered feature complete, bug free, and essentially a completed project[1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/openbox/comments/ngqz4s/is_openbox_still_being_developed/gyt19xd/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/openbox/comments/ngqz4s/is_openbox_...
- forgotpwd16 4y ago
  Checking the repo there're a number of PRs fixing bugs so it most definitely isn't bug free.
  - kqr 4y ago
    Then also not abandoned.
    - RealStickman_ 4y ago
      Assuming the maintainer actively merges PRs
- headsoup 4y ago
  And it's wonderful! For me it strikes the right balance of simplicity, efficiency and customisation.
hulitu 4y ago
Olvwm is very nice but unfortunately very hard to find.
- richardcrossley 4y ago
  I love Olvwm, way back at university we had Sun workstations. I have run it on Linux, but I don't think it can be readily compiled for 64 bit architectures on Linux. Maybe I'm wrong and someone may have achieved it, but I have never seen as a binary. Still on of my favorites though.
habitue 4y ago
Recently learned of Hyprland[0] a tiling WM for wayland that's kind of blingy and flashy. Looks interesting, I might install it [0]: https://github.com/vaxerski/Hyprland https://github.com/vaxerski/Hyprland
MiddleMan5 4y ago
I've used i3 on top of ubuntu 18.04 gnome for the past 4 years, and it's been mostly a positive experience. Pros: - Updates are consistent, very rarely do I experience a bug - Configuration is straightforward and flexible; simple yet very customizable - Integrates well with plugins like polybar (customizable toolbar) and rofi (tui app launcher) - Easy to position windows across multiple monitors Cons: - Very barebones - Difficult to configure apps that use multiple floating windows, splash screens, dynamic docks (gimp, eclipse, teams) - Programs can grab focus way too easily - Lacks smooth transition of control between windowed and floating modes I wished there was a wm that gave me the simplicity, stability, and snappiness of i3, but with better floating window support, and context menus to configure common window properties
- eismcc 4y ago
  I discovered i3 when looking for tiling solution and found it remarkably productive.
  - vladvasiliu 4y ago
    Ditto. But I think the issue is that it does things its way, so you have to be OK with not insisting on doing things how you used to. This was the biggest hurdle for me. But now I love it so much and have become so accustomed to its way of managing windows that I find myself mechanically reaching for my mod key whenever I'm on a different WM. I even find it irritating, when on macOS or Windows, to have to grab the window, move it around, adjust its size, etc. Bonus points for the new style Windows windows with controls integrated in the title bar and next to no area to grab.
- ducktective 4y ago
  >rofi (tui app launcher) rofi and dmenu are not TUI but built on top of lean native graphics APIs (`cairo` for rofi and `X11` in case of dmenu)
- rollcat 4y ago
  > I wished there was a wm that gave me the simplicity, stability, and snappiness of i3, but with better floating window support, and context menus to configure common window properties I think the "traditional" family of tiling window managers (like ratpoison, awesome, dwm, xmonad, i3, etc) are kind of simplistic in their assumptions that 1. they can at any time force any window into any size and position, and 2. they must always force every window into some size and position. In my opinion, a good algorithm of where to place a window (and what size to use) would go like: 1. Where the user expects it (e.g. last position) 2. Where it doesn't obscure anything else (optimal use of screen real estate without forcing a specific size/position/layout) 3. Wherever the application thinks it's best (the WM should never need to hardcode/configure rules like "GIMP is like this" or "xcalc works best with that") As for automatic tiling, I'm a big fan of what Windows is doing, and would love the traditional tiling WMs to iterate on this idea, while recognising floating windows as first-class citizens.
dvh 4y ago
I'm using jwm. 200kb binary, single xml configuration, mine look like gnome 2 with 10 virtual desktops. I like that my desktop layout haven't changed since 2008, no UX designer annoying me with new fad every 2 years. Screenshot: https://files.catbox.moe/t6qyve.png https://files.catbox.moe/t6qyve.png
- jl6 4y ago
  Is that a keystroke counter in the middle of a top menu bar?
  - dvh 4y ago
    Yes, a key logger running as root reading from /dev/input/... event file
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  I'm also using something very stable, since years and years (so long I don't remember): I'm using the tiling "Awesome VM". 13 virtual desktops. One (keyboard) modifier assigned only to the WM and not anything else. I'm always putting my regular apps on the same virtual desktops: work email on virtual desktop '1', throwaway browser on '9', Emacs on '3', shitloads of xterms and cpu/disk/network monitors and whatnots on '5', etc. It's minimal in its appareance: one-pixel border around windows, a tiny "useless gap" between windows (but not near the monitor's physical borders for the monitor's physical borders do, IMO, act as the "gap"). Been a happy camper since years.
hackarimoo 4y ago
Without a feature comparison grid, this is difficult to navigate and make use of.
Hortinstein 4y ago
I have dreamed of trying a window manager where instead of work spaces it has can be scrolled side to side like a big white board where you can pan and scroll and even zoom out to see the whole work space . The closest thing I have found are some VR work spaces, does anyone have any 2d reccomendations. Would love to see if this would work for my work flow
- aidenn0 4y ago
  Minus the zooming part, a lot of the window managers from the late 90s/early 00s worked this way. IIRC, GNOME 1 had an option for this. It didn't work that great because there just wasn't that much use for windows halfway between multiples of the screen size.
- dizhn 4y ago
  You used to get that free by setting your resolution higher than what your screen supported. It was horrible.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    For you maybe. It is a very nice feature.
- elviejo 4y ago
  I think what you are looking for is Cardboard: Scrollable window manager. Here is a review: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/cardboardwm.html https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/cardboardwm.html
- CmdrKrool 4y ago
  It's not a window manager as such, but you might enjoy playing with Eagle Mode: http://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/ http://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/
- whiteline_ 4y ago
  you can configure compiz to be exactly like this. there's a current project around keeping it alive/reviving it, in case you thought it was completely bitrotted. it's very subpar in other ways, you need to tweak it down to the last detail for you personal ergonomics, i personally use herbstluftwm these days

106 points by memorable 4y ago

Comprehensive is an accurate adjective. I occasionally try out different WM / DEs and always end up back at enlightenment. There are plenty on the list I've missed before. When I had a 3D monitor, I wanted to try a 3D WM. I didn't in getting one to run.

nobleach 4y ago
From the beginning, there has never been a cooler WM than Enlightenment. It brings back such great nostalgic memories of tweaking it for hours. Running CD ripping stuff, a Perl script for grabbing album artwork, and LAME encoding was my typical jam in 1998. In those days, I think I was running it on top of Gnome or something. These days, I've installed it a few times but, I've gotten old. I now am in the Honda Accord phase of life... so I just use whatever Gnome release is the latest.
jyrkesh 4y ago
I loved back in my Slackware/Gentoo days. But the last time I tried to run Linux on the desktop (on bare metal, in particular), I wanted to play with CentOS (just before the big changes). I ended up having to compile it from scratch, when was a fun challenge given that I was used to everything but RHEL-based distros. But a bunch of stuff was broken, and it was clear that Enlightenment had tried to reimplement a bunch of apps a la KDE/Gnome, and that development had stalled out. And that running a complex WM like that without a blessing from your package manager was a pain in the ass. So I installed GNOME. Nowadays, I just run Windows...

LAC-Tech 4y ago

Had a linux break due to the hardware I was using, but now have i3 as my "daily driver". I both like and dislike tiling windows. It's nice having stuff automatically take up non-overlapping space on the screen when you spawn new apps... but this doesn't scale. Even on a 32" monitor I almost never have any more than 3 windows. Which means I end up having way too many workspaces (aka "virtual desktops") to compensate. I remember using openbox back in the day, I've set aside some time to try it out again - a long with a new panel (would be a serious faux pas to use i3bar with openbox).

nobleach 4y ago
You see a lot of beautiful setups with i3 or BSPWM on /r/unixporn. I did use i3 for a solid year but... it's just not for me. I loved being able to navigate everything with the keyboard but, honestly, sometimes I just want overlapping windows (yes that's actually achievable with i3 - but it's kinda hacky)
- 3np 4y ago
  If you haven't checked out gnome-shell already, maybe that's something for you.
michaelmrose 4y ago
It's less hassle to change between more workspaces with few applications and one keybinding to select them than to switch between fewer workspaces and then alt tab or what have you between stacked applications.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  It's literally the same amount of keypresses.
  - Jenk 4y ago
    It's literally not. If you have 10 windows open that's up to 9 presses of alt+tab. With workspaces it's one press of whatever you have configured for the workspace, such as alt+1 (or 2 or 3, etc)
    - LAC-Tech 4y ago
      True, switching to workspace allows you to omit some keypresses since you immediately get to a smaller bucket of windows. But then once you get the workspace you want, more keypresses are to get it in focus.
      - 4y ago

layer8 4y ago

Thought #1: WMs are obviously much too easy to write. Thought #2: How about a meta window manager to run all those WMs in parallel and/or switch between them on the fly?

zajio1am 4y ago
You can switch WMs on the fly, just terminate one and start another. X server and applications survive restarting/switching WMs.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
  What command do you use for this? kill $pid && openbox doesn’t work for me.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
As sibling comment notes, you can switch between WMs at runtime, you just have to not exec the wm from xinitrc. Instead, you run a terminal emulator or whatever as the first X client, and then from there run the window manager like a normal program. I mean, I'm sure there are nicer ways to do it, but that worked for me. Alternatively, if you want to run multiple at once, you can run Xephyr, which nests X sessions, and then you just run whatever clients you want in each child X server, including the window manager.
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
  Any way of achieving this without opening a terminal? Presumably closing the terminal kills the WM?
  - dizhn 4y ago
    CTRL+ALT plus function keys to go to a console tty.

wrp 4y ago

About 15 years ago or so, I tried out just about every window manager on Linux I could find. I don't have any notes, but I recall that the majority of them were unstable. For anyone using this listing to find some WMs to try, comments on the stability of each would be very helpful.

mateuszf 4y ago

ion <3

forinti 4y ago

One useful feature of X is that you can start a GUI without a window manager. It's quite practical for a public kiosk.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
This is true, but you still have to position the window on the screen, you just end up doing it manually by forcing exact pixel coordinates. IME it's annoying enough then I'm surprised nobody's made... "fullscreenwm", a <1KB executable or perhaps even shell script that fullscreens the only window on the screen and then blocks forever. Or perhaps it exists or is such a trivial application of some window manipulation command line utility that it's unnecessary and I just haven't heard of it.
- forgotpwd16 4y ago
  xdotool getactivewindow windowmove 0 0 windowsize 100% 100% should work. At least for the fullscreens the only window part.
- gandalfff 4y ago
  You might like nullWM. https://github.com/DebianJoe/nullWM https://github.com/DebianJoe/nullWM
Arnavion 4y ago
For Wayland the cage compositor does the same thing.

pengaru 4y ago

Glad to see my window manager hasn't made the cut, the last thing I need is users...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jhgb 4y ago
> the last thing I need is users The Window Manager in the Glade? https://jaracimrman.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/pub-in-the-gladeprose1.pdf https://jaracimrman.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/pub-in-the-g... > The lawyer explained that my grandfather had been a notorious loner. He steered clear of everyone and couldn’t stand being near people. But as far back as anyone could remember he’d always longed to have his own pub. At first he opened a pub by the road to Písek. But people showed up. Then he rented a place on the square in Opočna, but they showed up there, too. And so he built this place.

nicklaf 4y ago

The tiling window manager I finally settled on is simply dwm. I'm not totally sure if it's the best window manager of its sort. I find it more ergonomic than StumpWM, and I haven't felt the need to reach for the other tiling window managers out there. A couple brilliant strokes in dwm are the alt-tab mechanism for swapping between workspaces rather than windows, and the idea that workspaces are actually just groups of windows which can be arbitrarily composed: more than one workspace can be selected at a time. In fact, alt-tabbing doesn't even swap individual workspace selections, but instead toggles back to the last such arbitrary group of selected workspaces. It's quite flexible and is under 2000 SLOC of C.

grawp 4y ago
The main feature that you've described is called (usually) 'tags' (windows have one or more tags and workspaces/viewports also have tags and a viewport displays all windows which have at least one of the viewport's tags). It is concept not specific to DWM at all and is much much older than it. Actually i3 and Sway feel like a big big regression in not suporting this concept even though they are so called manual tillers. Biggest disadwantages of DWM are: That it does not have any normal plugin/extension/IPC mechansim. Applying patches to add features is not sustainable and yield conflicts. So much for flexibility. Also it is not a wayland compositor.
ninjin 4y ago
I finally settled for dwm too nearly a year ago and I really can not emphasise how big of a deal the ~2,000 SLOC of code really is. It allows you to read it all in about an hour and once you have done that you will be “elevated” from user to developer. Now instead of desperately combing through manuals and guides with a fine comb you will just go “I could implement that…” now and then, which has been a game changer in terms of how I view software. Another commenter mentioned the lack of an extension framework and that applying patches could lead to conflicts, but I think this misses a bigger point. If you find yourself applying a ton of patches, just stop, dwm is supposed to be about minimalism and frugality, do you really need those features? I am very happy and productive with three patches: statusallmons [1] (~5 SLOC), warp [2] (~10 SLOC), and my own not-yet-public Fibonacci-style layout algorithm with a bit more features to support multi-head setups nicely (~90 SLOC). That is it! Keeping it simple may have seemed madness to me a year ago, but I think I now “get it” in terms of the freedom it brings through lower complexity, greater understanding, and thus ultimately hackability. [1]: https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/statusallmons https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/statusallmons [2]: https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/warp https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/warp Look at warp for a genius example of dwm simplicity. Other WMs will track the mouse pointer on a per-display basis and I was tempted to implement this for dwm, but then I tried the warp patch which is stupidly simple: move the mouse pointer to the centre of the currently focused window if it is not already inside it. No need for state and together with xbanish [3] you will always know where the mouse pointer is, yet it will not interfere with you while you work. ~10 SLOC, yet so incredibly powerful because it managed to take a novel stab at the heart of a problem. [3]: https://github.com/jcs/xbanish https://github.com/jcs/xbanish

pabs3 4y ago

Another window manager list site: http://www.xwinman.org/ http://www.xwinman.org/

esamueljohnson 4y ago

Openbox is not 'abandoned'. It is considered feature complete, bug free, and essentially a completed project[1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/openbox/comments/ngqz4s/is_openbox_still_being_developed/gyt19xd/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/openbox/comments/ngqz4s/is_openbox_...

forgotpwd16 4y ago
Checking the repo there're a number of PRs fixing bugs so it most definitely isn't bug free.
- kqr 4y ago
  Then also not abandoned.
  - RealStickman_ 4y ago
    Assuming the maintainer actively merges PRs
headsoup 4y ago
And it's wonderful! For me it strikes the right balance of simplicity, efficiency and customisation.

hulitu 4y ago

Olvwm is very nice but unfortunately very hard to find.

richardcrossley 4y ago
I love Olvwm, way back at university we had Sun workstations. I have run it on Linux, but I don't think it can be readily compiled for 64 bit architectures on Linux. Maybe I'm wrong and someone may have achieved it, but I have never seen as a binary. Still on of my favorites though.

habitue 4y ago

Recently learned of Hyprland[0] a tiling WM for wayland that's kind of blingy and flashy. Looks interesting, I might install it [0]: https://github.com/vaxerski/Hyprland https://github.com/vaxerski/Hyprland

MiddleMan5 4y ago

I've used i3 on top of ubuntu 18.04 gnome for the past 4 years, and it's been mostly a positive experience. Pros: - Updates are consistent, very rarely do I experience a bug - Configuration is straightforward and flexible; simple yet very customizable - Integrates well with plugins like polybar (customizable toolbar) and rofi (tui app launcher) - Easy to position windows across multiple monitors Cons: - Very barebones - Difficult to configure apps that use multiple floating windows, splash screens, dynamic docks (gimp, eclipse, teams) - Programs can grab focus way too easily - Lacks smooth transition of control between windowed and floating modes I wished there was a wm that gave me the simplicity, stability, and snappiness of i3, but with better floating window support, and context menus to configure common window properties

eismcc 4y ago
I discovered i3 when looking for tiling solution and found it remarkably productive.
- vladvasiliu 4y ago
  Ditto. But I think the issue is that it does things its way, so you have to be OK with not insisting on doing things how you used to. This was the biggest hurdle for me. But now I love it so much and have become so accustomed to its way of managing windows that I find myself mechanically reaching for my mod key whenever I'm on a different WM. I even find it irritating, when on macOS or Windows, to have to grab the window, move it around, adjust its size, etc. Bonus points for the new style Windows windows with controls integrated in the title bar and next to no area to grab.
ducktective 4y ago
>rofi (tui app launcher) rofi and dmenu are not TUI but built on top of lean native graphics APIs (`cairo` for rofi and `X11` in case of dmenu)
rollcat 4y ago
> I wished there was a wm that gave me the simplicity, stability, and snappiness of i3, but with better floating window support, and context menus to configure common window properties I think the "traditional" family of tiling window managers (like ratpoison, awesome, dwm, xmonad, i3, etc) are kind of simplistic in their assumptions that 1. they can at any time force any window into any size and position, and 2. they must always force every window into some size and position. In my opinion, a good algorithm of where to place a window (and what size to use) would go like: 1. Where the user expects it (e.g. last position) 2. Where it doesn't obscure anything else (optimal use of screen real estate without forcing a specific size/position/layout) 3. Wherever the application thinks it's best (the WM should never need to hardcode/configure rules like "GIMP is like this" or "xcalc works best with that") As for automatic tiling, I'm a big fan of what Windows is doing, and would love the traditional tiling WMs to iterate on this idea, while recognising floating windows as first-class citizens.

dvh 4y ago

I'm using jwm. 200kb binary, single xml configuration, mine look like gnome 2 with 10 virtual desktops. I like that my desktop layout haven't changed since 2008, no UX designer annoying me with new fad every 2 years. Screenshot: https://files.catbox.moe/t6qyve.png https://files.catbox.moe/t6qyve.png

jl6 4y ago
Is that a keystroke counter in the middle of a top menu bar?
- dvh 4y ago
  Yes, a key logger running as root reading from /dev/input/... event file
TacticalCoder 4y ago
I'm also using something very stable, since years and years (so long I don't remember): I'm using the tiling "Awesome VM". 13 virtual desktops. One (keyboard) modifier assigned only to the WM and not anything else. I'm always putting my regular apps on the same virtual desktops: work email on virtual desktop '1', throwaway browser on '9', Emacs on '3', shitloads of xterms and cpu/disk/network monitors and whatnots on '5', etc. It's minimal in its appareance: one-pixel border around windows, a tiny "useless gap" between windows (but not near the monitor's physical borders for the monitor's physical borders do, IMO, act as the "gap"). Been a happy camper since years.

hackarimoo 4y ago

Without a feature comparison grid, this is difficult to navigate and make use of.

Hortinstein 4y ago

I have dreamed of trying a window manager where instead of work spaces it has can be scrolled side to side like a big white board where you can pan and scroll and even zoom out to see the whole work space . The closest thing I have found are some VR work spaces, does anyone have any 2d reccomendations. Would love to see if this would work for my work flow

aidenn0 4y ago
Minus the zooming part, a lot of the window managers from the late 90s/early 00s worked this way. IIRC, GNOME 1 had an option for this. It didn't work that great because there just wasn't that much use for windows halfway between multiples of the screen size.
dizhn 4y ago
You used to get that free by setting your resolution higher than what your screen supported. It was horrible.
- hulitu 4y ago
  For you maybe. It is a very nice feature.
elviejo 4y ago
I think what you are looking for is Cardboard: Scrollable window manager. Here is a review: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/cardboardwm.html https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/cardboardwm.html
CmdrKrool 4y ago
It's not a window manager as such, but you might enjoy playing with Eagle Mode: http://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/ http://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/
whiteline_ 4y ago
you can configure compiz to be exactly like this. there's a current project around keeping it alive/reviving it, in case you thought it was completely bitrotted. it's very subpar in other ways, you need to tweak it down to the last detail for you personal ergonomics, i personally use herbstluftwm these days