12 ms·

My quest for the perfect window manager (2004)

84 points by indigodaddy 4y ago

pcmoney 4y ago
Whats the best window manager for Mac?
- selykg 4y ago
  I really like Rectangle. There’s a ton of apps like it. Some even more complex and some even more simple. Depends on your needs.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  The window manager is part of the UI stack on macOS and can’t be replaced in the way a Linux user would expect. There are utilities that attempt to provide some alternative window behaviors; they are all hacks — by necessity — because macOS does not support altering window behavior/appearance globally.
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    And X-Windows + ICCCM (I39L) isn't a hack??! And why doesn't X-Windows also support altering menu appearance globally (like supporting pie menus in every app), too? NeWS did, over three decades ago. NeWS Tab Window Demo (1990) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4 X-Windows Disaster https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398... Ice Cube: The Lethal Weapon One of the fundamental design goals of X was to separate the window manager from the window server. “Mechanism, not policy” was the mantra. That is, the X server provided a mechanism for drawing on the screen and managing windows, but did not implement a particular policy for human-computer interaction. While this might have seemed like a good idea at the time (especially if you are in a research community, experimenting with different approaches for solving the human-computer interaction problem), it can create a veritable user interface Tower of Babel. If you sit down at a friend’s Macintosh, with its single mouse button, you can use it with no problems. If you sit down at a friend’s Windows box, with two buttons, you can use it, again with no problems. But just try making sense of a friend’s X terminal: three buttons, each one programmed a different way to perform a different function on each different day of the week — and that’s before you consider combinations like control-left-button, shift-right-button, control-shift-meta-middle-button, and so on. Things are not much better from the programmer’s point of view. As a result, one of the most amazing pieces of literature to come out of the X Consortium is the “Inter Client Communication Conventions Manual,” more fondly known as the “ICCCM”, “Ice Cubed,” or “I39L” (short for “I, 39 letters, L”). It describes protocols that X clients must use to communicate with each other via the X server, including diverse topics like window management, selections, keyboard and colormap focus, and session management. In short, it tries to cover everything the X designers forgot and tries to fix everything they got wrong. But it was too late — by the time ICCCM was published, people were already writing window managers and toolkits, so each new version of the ICCCM was forced to bend over backwards to be backward compatible with the mistakes of the past. The ICCCM is unbelievably dense, it must be followed to the last letter, and it still doesn’t work. ICCCM compliance is one of the most complex ordeals of implementing X toolkits, window managers, and even simple applications. It’s so difficult, that many of the benefits just aren’t worth the hassle of compliance. And when one program doesn’t comply, it screws up other programs. This is the reason cut-and-paste never works properly with X (unless you are cutting and pasting straight ASCII text), drag-and-drop locks up the system, colormaps flash wildly and are never installed at the right time, keyboard focus lags behind the cursor, keys go to the wrong window, and deleting a popup window can quit the whole application. If you want to write an interoperable ICCCM compliant application, you have to crossbar test it with every other application, and with all possible window managers, and then plead with the vendors to fix their problems in the next release. In summary, ICCCM is a technological disaster: a toxic waste dump of broken protocols, backward compatibility nightmares, complex nonsolutions to obsolete nonproblems, a twisted mass of scabs and scar tissue intended to cover up the moral and intellectual depravity of the industry’s standard naked emperor. Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes. - Jamie Zawinski
    - bitwize 4y ago
      The good news is that just as X has a modern replacement in Wayland, there's a modern replacement for NeWS -- the browser/Electron. The architecture is fundamentally similar: the server uploads code to present the UI to the client. It's just in JavaScript instead of PostScript. It would take a bit of work, but something like a desktop environment that runs as a single full-screen Electron app with a React UI should be feasible.
      - DonHopkins 4y ago
        I wrote the following description of how NeWS relates to modern web browsers and "AJAX" in the NeWS article on Wikipedia, and I also worked on TNT (The NeWS Toolkit) at Sun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS >NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently: >- used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming. >- used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering. >- used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation. >TNT-based applications >The best example of such a library is TNT (The NeWS Toolkit) which Sun released in 1989. Sun also shipped an earlier "Lite" toolkit intended for example purposes and making small programs. Here's a good example of a TNT application I developed called "PizzaTool" that shipped with Solaris 2 / SVR4 Unix OpenWindows: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-pizzatool-2a7992b4c797 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems... >The Story of Sun Microsystems PizzaTool: How I accidentally ordered my first pizza over the internet. It was meant to be a programming example for TNT, so the object oriented PostScript source code is heavily commented: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt And it has a manual page: https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.6 https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.6 Before going to Sun, I also developed an early hypermedia browser and authoring tool called HyperTIES written in NeWS and using UniPress Emacs at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab, which supported pie menus and tabbed windows. That is illustrated on both the NeWS and Tab (interface) pages on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS#/media/File:HyperTIESAuthoring.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS#/media/File:HyperTIESAuth... >HyperTIES is an early hypermedia browser developed under the direction of Dr. Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab. This screen snapshot shows the HyperTIES authoring tool (built with UniPress's Gosling Emacs text editor, written in MockLisp) and browser (built with the NeWS window system, written in PostScript, C and Forth). The tabbed windows and pie menu reusable components were developed by Don Hopkins, who also developed the NeWS Emacs (NeMACS) and HyperTIES user interfaces. (Sorry about the quality -- this is a scan of an old screen dump printed by a laser printer.) https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsing-a-look-back-at-the-hyperties-workstation-browser-535eab3a3b3c https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsi... >Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser By Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, William Weiland. Published in Hypermedia, vol. 3, 2 (1991)101–117. https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hacker-news-937d156f0330 https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac... >HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News: I’m putting this lightly edited archive of a bunch of different discussions and email about HyperTIES, all together in one place here on Medium. Please forgive the rough wall of text and redundancy, but I haven’t yet had time to distill it all down into one sentence. I will just include the email I sent to Ben Shneiderman summarizing the interesting posts and links, for now. Here goes: [...] And speaking of "good news", there was an even more wonderful user interface toolkit and deeply user customizable window manager for NeWS, like HyperCard with PostScript programming and colorful stencil/paint graphics and networking instead of Hypertalk scripting and black and white bitmap graphics and no networking, which I worked on porting to TNT at the Turing Institute with Arthur van Hoff, first called "GoodNeWS", then "HyperNeWS", then finally "HyperLook", which I used to port SimCity to Unix. You could use HyperLook's built-in PostScript drawing editor to define the shape and look and feel of any of your windows, drawing arbitrarily shaped scalable window frames and content, and cutting and pasting in scriptable buttons and widgets with graphics, like customizable clocks and custom menus, etc. The Encapsulated PostScript drawing editor itself was a reusable component that other components could incorporate, like the way the customizable clock's property sheet had drawing editors to edit the clock face and hands, so you could edit the clock's appearance. Decades later there are still no X-Windows window managers (or even Wayland window managers) that are anything like HyperLook. https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-goodnews-99f411e58ce4 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-g... >SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS)) >HyperLook was like HyperCard for NeWS, with PostScript graphics and scripting plus networking. Here are three unique and wacky examples that plug together to show what HyperNeWS was all about, and where we could go in the future! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_van_Hoff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_van_Hoff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Institute The "perfect" X-Windows or Wayland window manger should be more like HyperLook was 30 years ago, and enable users to easily customize the shape and graphics and behavior of their window frames and contents with a fully featured built-in graphics editor, paste in custom buttons and widgets from a library into those window frames and client applications, or create and script your own, like pie menus and arbitrarily shaped tabs stuck onto any window edge -- not just the top edge, and even edit the properties and graphics of those widgets and tabs and menus, like how the clock face and hands looked. How would you even begin to implement something like that with X-Windows or Wayland? (It would be a waste of time to do that for X-Windows at this point, but there's a reason nobody's bothered to try in 30 years.)
  - corrral 4y ago
    > they are all hacks — by necessity To be clear, though, the "hack" I use (Spectacle) isn't even actively developed anymore, but has worked flawlessly through a decade of macOS upgrades. Zero problems, zero glitches, even with multiple monitors it just works exactly how I expect. If only non-"hack" Linux GUI software were this stable and perfectly-functioning over such a long time span.
- creakingstairs 4y ago
  I use Yabai. It’s free, open source and works amazing. Need some fiddling around at the start though.
- sphynxie 4y ago
  Been using amethyst for years, can't live without it
gigatexal 4y ago
It exists. For me, at least, it’s i3. I can’t be productive with anything else. I love it. It’s like vim or git or Linux itself. It just fits the way I think.
- colordrops 4y ago
  I'm curious if anyone who has put in enough effort to get familiar with a tiling window manager has ever gone back to a traditional one. IMO tiling window managers are superior in every way.
  - a-dub 4y ago
    they're terrible when you need to float windows (like plots, or gui apps, or gui system utilities). i used to think about how i could merge the two and have floating vs. tiling desktops. then i realized i could just run a full screen terminal on one desktop and run tmux within it. it can be a little annoying with just one screen but otherwise great. (incidentally, i also used to be a window maker person, and an actual nextstep person... after those two i ran something extremely lightweight, with small thin window decorations and that's it. i cannot remember the name)
    - colordrops 4y ago
      You can float windows in i3.
      - a-dub 4y ago
        yeah... but i remember it not being their core focus and it ending up kinda like a mcdonald's salad. you can do it, but there are better places to go for that. is it good? like if i'm doing something new and something new wants to pop a floating window, can i just keep doing my thing or do i have to start thinking about my window manager? i find that dedicating a screen to tmux and another screen to a classic desktop environment gives the best of both worlds. (subject to the limitation of becoming dependent on multiple screens)
  - 4y ago
alfiedotwtf 4y ago
IMHO bspwm is the Emacs of window managers - it provides you the Lego bricks to build your own personalised window manager. Out of the box it's nothing fancy, but given time, you can make it do whatever you want!
- greggyb 4y ago
  Is emacs not the emacs of window managers with exwm?
  - alfiedotwtf 4y ago
    lol, nice :) Edit: oh that wasn't a joke... this is an actual thing :mindblown:
- imiric 4y ago
  Indeed. I've tried a bunch over the years: i3, Qtile, Xmonad, herbstluftwm, awesome, dwm... And the most popular floating ones: Gnome, KWin, xfwm, Blackbox, etc. They can pry bspwm+sxhkd out of my cold dead hands. It's a fast, lightweight and rock-solid environment, with simple yet flexible customization. It gets out of my way and works exactly as I want it to. I've been using it for years, and don't have the need to switch to anything else. I'm only hoping that something similar can exist for Wayland. Otherwise I don't see myself switching from X anytime soon. Please support the author if you have the means: https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm/blob/master/doc/CONTRIBUTING.md#donations https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm/blob/master/doc/CONTRIB...
  - kevincali 4y ago
    Same for me. Using it for years and it's been extremely reliable on my desktop. Though I have to admit, that I miss a good DE integration for my laptop. I tried both Plasma and XFCE, but both of them have some quirks while having bspwm as the WM. Maybe I'll try out GNOME with Pop Shell. Seems pretty nice out of the box.
dinvlad 4y ago
Wolfgang's channel had an interesting take on it recently: "Tiling Window Managers suck. Here's why" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n_rl9jWUMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n_rl9jWUMo
- mikenew 4y ago
  He makes some great points and I can relate to most of them, but my god do I love my tiling window manager. There is nothing on earth that would convince me to go back to stacking. IMO, the key thing about tiling window managers is that if you configure it correctly, you always know where everything is, and you're only ever one or two keystrokes (or mouse clicks) away. For example, on my setup, workspace 8 is always Firefox. If I open workspace 8 and Firefox hasn't been launched yet it immediately opens. Workspace 7 is my meassaging app, 6 is discord, 1 is a terminal, and so on. Windows are never hidden behind each other so you never go hunting for anything. There's also a lot of little customization things that make it feel really nice. Like I can hit a hotkey to size a youtube video to a pixel-perfect, borderless 720p window with other windows filling space around it. Or a global hotkey to hide notifications for the next hour. I have a "get focused" hotkey that will lock the screen and require an admin password if I open the browser. TWMs are definitely not for everybody. But for me it removes a ton of frustration that I get with stacking window managers, and it lets me customize my own experience in ways that I find super valuable.
  - indigodaddy 4y ago
    I like what you describe here...! I haven't been in Linux-land for awhile as I got a new Windows 11 laptop recentlyish and haven't put Linux on it yet, and my work laptop is Windows.. But for my new upcoming job they should be sending me a Macbook. Does the latest OS X have a workspace concept? If not is there an free application that can implement workspaces/desktops on OS X?
    - uberduper 4y ago
      OSX has a fantastic workspace implementation.
igetspam 4y ago
Lost me at "sloppy focus." I actually quite liked fvwm and use sloppy focus still. I've become too lazy to bother knowing which WM is running on my machine but the lack of sloppy focus is the single feature that has prevented me from using Apple products forever. (I think the UX sucks too but if the focus worked as I wanted and the window management was a multi layered disaster, I could cope.)
- thanatos519 4y ago
  For me, it's lack of sloppy focus and the mandatory raise-on-focus. I regularly have small utility windows floating in front of terminals or browsers and I don't want a click on those big windows to pull them in front of the small windows. I hear iTerm has sloppy focus between its own windows, but ... that's not enough, is it?
- tux2bsd 4y ago
  WindowMaker does sloppy focus very well.
leephillips 4y ago
Once I tried dwm, I never looked back.
0des 4y ago
The older I get, the more I get the urge to return to monke, and just use tmux. Maybe on friday I go all out and boot up a GUI with some type of nifty nature wallpapers showing through my terminals. FVWM is completely legit as well, albeit a little heavy when compared to TWM or my favorite Rio, with Acme of course. Heavy is relative in this sense, I've run FVWM on reprogrammed childrens toys with the processing power of a warm potato.
- michaelcampbell 4y ago
  I went on a wm hunt in the early/mid 90's as well on my (company provided) SPARCStation. I went through all I could find and compile, but I landed on either fvwm or twm; the memory escapes me. I remember an interesting one ("piewm"?) that had its menus originate radially like pie-slices instead of a dropdown to the right; the theory being that you would have to move your mouse less to get to any given option. I honestly don't understand the OP's hatred of fvwm, but people like different things.
- amelius 4y ago
  How about a WM-equivalent of tmux, where you can put graphical windows into a detached state, and open them on a different computer?
  - 0des 4y ago
    welcome to plan9, there is cake and napalm at the table by the door.
- NoGravitas 4y ago
  I actually really liked TWM, and thought it was distinctly underrated.
eximius 4y ago
I just need Awesome ported to Wayland, but it's apparently difficult for Wayland reasons I no longer recall.
- kaba0 4y ago
  I don’t think there is anything in wayland that would make the porting hard.
  - herewulf 4y ago
    Depends on how tightly coupled the WM is to X. My chosen tiling WM (StumpWM) is not easily portable. The development discussion has been that it's easier to rewrite. I used xmonad for years before that.. Well, it's in the name. It's not getting ported to Wayland. Not easily anyway.
  - eximius 4y ago
    Hm, I might be conflating the only project I was aware of that was trying to do that... with the problems they ran into with Rust/Wayland interop. Wayland has lifecycle assumptions that break Rust's assumptions without a gratuitous amount of unergonomic wrapper code, or something. (Which is concerning in some ways...)
  - pengaru 4y ago
    Porting a plain Xlib/xcb window manager to wayland is a mountain of work. Just look at wlroots to get a sense of how much code one has to write (or embrace in the form of wlroots) that an X11 WM largely doesn't need concern itself with.
  - michaelmrose 4y ago
    What's hard is rewriting from scratch starting at a lower level.
    - NoGravitas 4y ago
      I think anyone trying to write a Wayland compositor at this point, especially if they are rewriting an X window manager, should be using WLRoots. I don't /think/ writing a compositor with WLRoots is lower level that writing an X wm in, say, XCB.
beej71 4y ago
I must have run fvwm for a decade before switching to xfce. I do kinda miss it, so lightweight. But I really also appreciate a lot of things xfce makes easier.
heywoodlh 4y ago
I used to be a huge i3 user (and sometimes I give in to the temptation to load it up and mess with my config). I love tweaking my desktop to make it look like it should be on /r/unixporn. However, there are certain desktop things I don't enjoy messing with at all: - audio - displays - bluetooth Audio is especially confusing on Linux because there are so many parts to one system. Even after researching PulseAudio, ALSA, Pipewire, Jack, etc. it is super hard for me to know exactly what does what on my Linux machines. I found that with i3 I often spent more time tweaking my desktop than actually doing work. However, I think that tweaking like this is actually super fun and educational on how Linux display stuff works -- I would never discourage someone from taking the time to mess around with i3, bspwm, or an alternative. My perfect balance is GNOME plus the Pop! OS shell extension[1]. I'm not a Pop! OS user (and likely never will be) but I loooove having tiling in GNOME and being able to have all the stuff I don't like to manage just work. [1] https://github.com/pop-os/shell https://github.com/pop-os/shell EDIT: minor grammar tweak
- darthrupert 4y ago
  Audio is fixed by just using pipewire. Displays is fixed by using Wayland (sway). Bluetooth is indeed an unsolved problem. I suppose the skilled hacker types have just declared the whole protocol as broken and use wires.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    Pipewire “solves”, or at least improves the bluetooth landscape quite a bit. Do I read parent as saying that these things are best managed through GUI widgets attached to the desktop environment
    - heywoodlh 4y ago
      > Do I read parent as saying that these things are best managed through GUI widgets attached to the desktop environment 100% you are reading my original comment correctly. An example I ran into recently: I start up bluetoothctl, I power on the adapter, start scanning for Blueooth devices and am spammed by a bluetooth device nearby to the point where I can't see the one I am trying to pair to (even after turning off scanning). In contrast, blueman-applet or GNOME's control-center neatly organizes each unique Bluetooth device as individual icons and makes it easy to see each of those. Lots of little papercuts like that can make it frustrating when you're just trying to get work done. This is also true things like displays -- sure I could take 20 minutes write a script to rearrange my displays the way I prefer -- or I could just open GNOME's control center and take two minutes using the display setting. There are lots of little things like this that can get in the way when you just need to get something done. And this is totally subjective to my experience, my opinion and what I currently value so please don't take this like I am saying everyone should prioritize things the way I do. For those more comfortable in i3 or something else -- great! :)
forgotmypw17 4y ago
There are two main things I want from the wm on my workstation: plainness and stability. I want plainness because the wm is just framing my applications, not the main atteaction. I want stability because my workstation should not be rearranged without my consent or request. After a long time looking, I'm happy for a while now. IMO, other than the small additions of being able to toggle "on top" and virtual desktops, Windows 95 pretty much did it as far as a functional, efficient, and subtly stylish UI. Mac 8 is not bad either, but didn't have the keyboard accessibility.
thom 4y ago
I remember back in the 90s caring about window managers and playing with Enlightenment and its weird wavy desktop. It was cool because it was different. I used Blackbox throughout university because we were all on a shared server doing remote X sessions and everyone loading KDE at the start of a lesson would slow it to a crawl. But then I got two monitors and a job and stopped caring. I need virtual desktops, a launcher, and a good settings app. I’ve never tiled windows outside of Emacs, which runs full screen on one monitor opposite a browser on the other monitor. I’m baffled by people who need to have seven terminals open alongside a tiny YouTube video. Either watch the video or do some work.
- hn1337 4y ago
  That's a common argument which is essentially, "I grew up and needed to be productive so that's why I don't use tiling window managers." It's ironic and silly because I use a tiling window manager to _be_ productive. I have used the same settings, window manager and configuration since 2006. That is exactly why I love it, it's stable as can be and I can rely on it forever (at least until X11 doesn't work anymore, but I will probably be dead by then).
  - forgotpwd16 4y ago
    Which window manager? I think only ratpoison, larswm, and Ion existed back then? As for X11, recently changes were added to Xwayland's rootfull mode to allow running a full X environment on Wayland.
    - scbrg 4y ago
      Both dwm and wmii existed in 2006.
    - hn1337 4y ago
      I use dwm, in particular a Debian netinstall with no desktop environment. Simply install X and dwm. I have my own fork of dwm with my customizations on a separate branch. I can update dwm by pulling master and rebasing my branch on master. Has worked since 2006. With that being said, dwm hasn't changed much since 2006.
thanatos519 4y ago
I still <3 sawfish for its fine-grained mouse+keyboard shortcut customization, regex-matching per-window behaviour modification, zoom-to-fill-space, and easy themeing ... but it's rusty, bordering on abandonware, and mate's marco is good enough with the sloppy focus and no-raise-on-focus-or-click that I require.
- toomim 4y ago
  Sawfish was my favorite all-time wm, but it doesn't work well now. :-(
kstenerud 4y ago
I really liked AmigaOS 3.x. It was (for the time) pleasant to look at, had decent contrast, and generally got out of your way. But Windows 95 was better. MUCH higher contrast, very clear delineation between controls, and consistency of operations. Plus you could resize windows from any corner! Then Windows XP came along and ruined everything. And the Windows UI continued to go downhill from there. At least it came with a "classic" theme for awhile. Then I switched to MacOS Leopard. It was nice overall, but going back to menus at the top of the screen felt like a step backwards. At least it had contrast and clear delineation between controls, so I was on the whole happy. Then they started to flatten things, reduce contrast, and generally make a pig's breakfast of everything. Now I've settled on Mate Desktop. It's mostly there, better in some ways, worse in others. But overall it's pleasant to work with, low impact, and gets out of your way. And at the end of the day that's all I really wanted.
mst 4y ago
http://trout.me.uk/X11/fvwm2rc http://trout.me.uk/X11/fvwm2rc Plus '#ffee66' for http://trout.me.uk/X11/xclus http://trout.me.uk/X11/xclus will result in: http://trout.me.uk/screenshot4.png http://trout.me.uk/screenshot4.png Everybody else's mileage will definitely vary. ("real" GUI wise, I still miss RISC OS ;)
winReInstall 4y ago
It might sound stupid, but is there a visual equivalent to linux pipes? As in, i have a software that has something iterratable (browser search result, fileexplorer, document) and these result "plop" out into a visual pipe, were they get filtered (either by hand or by some NN-magic or by code) and processed by other pipleline parts. Finally the result drops out into a Folder, a File, a SnyDrive or some CMS system. I just want to have that factorio overview over my whole workprocess pipeline and everything stuck in it. Inclusive rerouting capability. That would be supersweet. Has that ever been attempted?
- dmfay 4y ago
  I haven't tried it myself yet but https://arcan-fe.com/2021/04/12/introducing-pipeworld/ https://arcan-fe.com/2021/04/12/introducing-pipeworld/ has been on my radar for a while.
- pyinstallwoes 4y ago
  Yeah I think something like Slurp in Plan 9 is that.
amelius 4y ago
Please give me a button in the top-bar of every window that will disable all keyboard and mouse input to that window. Another request (which I know is more difficult to implement) is to have a button in the top-bar that mutes the audio of that window.
bigpeopleareold 4y ago
KDE Plasma (of course with kwin :D) is good enough for Linuxes (Kubuntu for me to be precise). My own jury is still out on how well it works on FreeBSD - which I am more attentive over, but I seen kwin use a lot of CPU for periods of time, spinning up the fans after a resume. But that was before I lowered the scheduling threshold from the recommendation ... but otherwise, it works fine. But I settled because I really just don't care enough to optimize this part of my computing workflow. I guess the hip thing to describe it now here on HN is to call it "boring" ... to me, it is quite boring. :) I recommended KDE to a co-worker when deciding to use Ubuntu to get a Windows-y feel. So far, he's been happy with it too.
marcodiego 4y ago
One thing I miss from those times: themes with textures for your windows. I wouldn't use it since they look distracting but they were beautiful.
teddyh 4y ago
My first window manager (on Unix) was Open Look Window Manager (olwm, later olvwm), since this was the default when starting Open Windows on SunOS 4 in 1992. After a few years of mostly using the Open Windows tools, including using MailTool for e-mail, I went through a process of trying to pare down my tooling dependencies to the bare minimum, in order to be able to discover what my actual needs were, so that I could choose better tools appropriately. This included switching from MailTool to Unix mail(1), and using twm(1) as a Window Manager (Not a tiled window manager; the Tab Window Manager, i.e. the basic window manager which was and is included in the standard X11 distribution). I have since switched to more capable mail readers, etc. but I continue to use twm as a window manager to this day. I have found that I simply don’t need anything more than that.
Pakdef 4y ago
I really like tiling window managers but they have too many bugs to be usable... In the meantime I use XFCE and snap windows to quarter, half or full screen

84 points by indigodaddy 4y ago

pcmoney 4y ago

Whats the best window manager for Mac?

selykg 4y ago
I really like Rectangle. There’s a ton of apps like it. Some even more complex and some even more simple. Depends on your needs.
KerrAvon 4y ago
The window manager is part of the UI stack on macOS and can’t be replaced in the way a Linux user would expect. There are utilities that attempt to provide some alternative window behaviors; they are all hacks — by necessity — because macOS does not support altering window behavior/appearance globally.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  And X-Windows + ICCCM (I39L) isn't a hack??! And why doesn't X-Windows also support altering menu appearance globally (like supporting pie menus in every app), too? NeWS did, over three decades ago. NeWS Tab Window Demo (1990) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4 X-Windows Disaster https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398... Ice Cube: The Lethal Weapon One of the fundamental design goals of X was to separate the window manager from the window server. “Mechanism, not policy” was the mantra. That is, the X server provided a mechanism for drawing on the screen and managing windows, but did not implement a particular policy for human-computer interaction. While this might have seemed like a good idea at the time (especially if you are in a research community, experimenting with different approaches for solving the human-computer interaction problem), it can create a veritable user interface Tower of Babel. If you sit down at a friend’s Macintosh, with its single mouse button, you can use it with no problems. If you sit down at a friend’s Windows box, with two buttons, you can use it, again with no problems. But just try making sense of a friend’s X terminal: three buttons, each one programmed a different way to perform a different function on each different day of the week — and that’s before you consider combinations like control-left-button, shift-right-button, control-shift-meta-middle-button, and so on. Things are not much better from the programmer’s point of view. As a result, one of the most amazing pieces of literature to come out of the X Consortium is the “Inter Client Communication Conventions Manual,” more fondly known as the “ICCCM”, “Ice Cubed,” or “I39L” (short for “I, 39 letters, L”). It describes protocols that X clients must use to communicate with each other via the X server, including diverse topics like window management, selections, keyboard and colormap focus, and session management. In short, it tries to cover everything the X designers forgot and tries to fix everything they got wrong. But it was too late — by the time ICCCM was published, people were already writing window managers and toolkits, so each new version of the ICCCM was forced to bend over backwards to be backward compatible with the mistakes of the past. The ICCCM is unbelievably dense, it must be followed to the last letter, and it still doesn’t work. ICCCM compliance is one of the most complex ordeals of implementing X toolkits, window managers, and even simple applications. It’s so difficult, that many of the benefits just aren’t worth the hassle of compliance. And when one program doesn’t comply, it screws up other programs. This is the reason cut-and-paste never works properly with X (unless you are cutting and pasting straight ASCII text), drag-and-drop locks up the system, colormaps flash wildly and are never installed at the right time, keyboard focus lags behind the cursor, keys go to the wrong window, and deleting a popup window can quit the whole application. If you want to write an interoperable ICCCM compliant application, you have to crossbar test it with every other application, and with all possible window managers, and then plead with the vendors to fix their problems in the next release. In summary, ICCCM is a technological disaster: a toxic waste dump of broken protocols, backward compatibility nightmares, complex nonsolutions to obsolete nonproblems, a twisted mass of scabs and scar tissue intended to cover up the moral and intellectual depravity of the industry’s standard naked emperor. Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes. - Jamie Zawinski
  - bitwize 4y ago
    The good news is that just as X has a modern replacement in Wayland, there's a modern replacement for NeWS -- the browser/Electron. The architecture is fundamentally similar: the server uploads code to present the UI to the client. It's just in JavaScript instead of PostScript. It would take a bit of work, but something like a desktop environment that runs as a single full-screen Electron app with a React UI should be feasible.
    - DonHopkins 4y ago
      I wrote the following description of how NeWS relates to modern web browsers and "AJAX" in the NeWS article on Wikipedia, and I also worked on TNT (The NeWS Toolkit) at Sun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS >NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently: >- used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming. >- used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering. >- used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation. >TNT-based applications >The best example of such a library is TNT (The NeWS Toolkit) which Sun released in 1989. Sun also shipped an earlier "Lite" toolkit intended for example purposes and making small programs. Here's a good example of a TNT application I developed called "PizzaTool" that shipped with Solaris 2 / SVR4 Unix OpenWindows: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-pizzatool-2a7992b4c797 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems... >The Story of Sun Microsystems PizzaTool: How I accidentally ordered my first pizza over the internet. It was meant to be a programming example for TNT, so the object oriented PostScript source code is heavily commented: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt And it has a manual page: https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.6 https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.6 Before going to Sun, I also developed an early hypermedia browser and authoring tool called HyperTIES written in NeWS and using UniPress Emacs at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab, which supported pie menus and tabbed windows. That is illustrated on both the NeWS and Tab (interface) pages on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS#/media/File:HyperTIESAuthoring.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS#/media/File:HyperTIESAuth... >HyperTIES is an early hypermedia browser developed under the direction of Dr. Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab. This screen snapshot shows the HyperTIES authoring tool (built with UniPress's Gosling Emacs text editor, written in MockLisp) and browser (built with the NeWS window system, written in PostScript, C and Forth). The tabbed windows and pie menu reusable components were developed by Don Hopkins, who also developed the NeWS Emacs (NeMACS) and HyperTIES user interfaces. (Sorry about the quality -- this is a scan of an old screen dump printed by a laser printer.) https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsing-a-look-back-at-the-hyperties-workstation-browser-535eab3a3b3c https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsi... >Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser By Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, William Weiland. Published in Hypermedia, vol. 3, 2 (1991)101–117. https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hacker-news-937d156f0330 https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac... >HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News: I’m putting this lightly edited archive of a bunch of different discussions and email about HyperTIES, all together in one place here on Medium. Please forgive the rough wall of text and redundancy, but I haven’t yet had time to distill it all down into one sentence. I will just include the email I sent to Ben Shneiderman summarizing the interesting posts and links, for now. Here goes: [...] And speaking of "good news", there was an even more wonderful user interface toolkit and deeply user customizable window manager for NeWS, like HyperCard with PostScript programming and colorful stencil/paint graphics and networking instead of Hypertalk scripting and black and white bitmap graphics and no networking, which I worked on porting to TNT at the Turing Institute with Arthur van Hoff, first called "GoodNeWS", then "HyperNeWS", then finally "HyperLook", which I used to port SimCity to Unix. You could use HyperLook's built-in PostScript drawing editor to define the shape and look and feel of any of your windows, drawing arbitrarily shaped scalable window frames and content, and cutting and pasting in scriptable buttons and widgets with graphics, like customizable clocks and custom menus, etc. The Encapsulated PostScript drawing editor itself was a reusable component that other components could incorporate, like the way the customizable clock's property sheet had drawing editors to edit the clock face and hands, so you could edit the clock's appearance. Decades later there are still no X-Windows window managers (or even Wayland window managers) that are anything like HyperLook. https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-goodnews-99f411e58ce4 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-g... >SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS)) >HyperLook was like HyperCard for NeWS, with PostScript graphics and scripting plus networking. Here are three unique and wacky examples that plug together to show what HyperNeWS was all about, and where we could go in the future! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_van_Hoff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_van_Hoff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Institute The "perfect" X-Windows or Wayland window manger should be more like HyperLook was 30 years ago, and enable users to easily customize the shape and graphics and behavior of their window frames and contents with a fully featured built-in graphics editor, paste in custom buttons and widgets from a library into those window frames and client applications, or create and script your own, like pie menus and arbitrarily shaped tabs stuck onto any window edge -- not just the top edge, and even edit the properties and graphics of those widgets and tabs and menus, like how the clock face and hands looked. How would you even begin to implement something like that with X-Windows or Wayland? (It would be a waste of time to do that for X-Windows at this point, but there's a reason nobody's bothered to try in 30 years.)
- corrral 4y ago
  > they are all hacks — by necessity To be clear, though, the "hack" I use (Spectacle) isn't even actively developed anymore, but has worked flawlessly through a decade of macOS upgrades. Zero problems, zero glitches, even with multiple monitors it just works exactly how I expect. If only non-"hack" Linux GUI software were this stable and perfectly-functioning over such a long time span.
creakingstairs 4y ago
I use Yabai. It’s free, open source and works amazing. Need some fiddling around at the start though.
sphynxie 4y ago
Been using amethyst for years, can't live without it

gigatexal 4y ago

It exists. For me, at least, it’s i3. I can’t be productive with anything else. I love it. It’s like vim or git or Linux itself. It just fits the way I think.

colordrops 4y ago
I'm curious if anyone who has put in enough effort to get familiar with a tiling window manager has ever gone back to a traditional one. IMO tiling window managers are superior in every way.
- a-dub 4y ago
  they're terrible when you need to float windows (like plots, or gui apps, or gui system utilities). i used to think about how i could merge the two and have floating vs. tiling desktops. then i realized i could just run a full screen terminal on one desktop and run tmux within it. it can be a little annoying with just one screen but otherwise great. (incidentally, i also used to be a window maker person, and an actual nextstep person... after those two i ran something extremely lightweight, with small thin window decorations and that's it. i cannot remember the name)
  - colordrops 4y ago
    You can float windows in i3.
    - a-dub 4y ago
      yeah... but i remember it not being their core focus and it ending up kinda like a mcdonald's salad. you can do it, but there are better places to go for that. is it good? like if i'm doing something new and something new wants to pop a floating window, can i just keep doing my thing or do i have to start thinking about my window manager? i find that dedicating a screen to tmux and another screen to a classic desktop environment gives the best of both worlds. (subject to the limitation of becoming dependent on multiple screens)
- 4y ago

alfiedotwtf 4y ago

IMHO bspwm is the Emacs of window managers - it provides you the Lego bricks to build your own personalised window manager. Out of the box it's nothing fancy, but given time, you can make it do whatever you want!

greggyb 4y ago
Is emacs not the emacs of window managers with exwm?
- alfiedotwtf 4y ago
  lol, nice :) Edit: oh that wasn't a joke... this is an actual thing :mindblown:
imiric 4y ago
Indeed. I've tried a bunch over the years: i3, Qtile, Xmonad, herbstluftwm, awesome, dwm... And the most popular floating ones: Gnome, KWin, xfwm, Blackbox, etc. They can pry bspwm+sxhkd out of my cold dead hands. It's a fast, lightweight and rock-solid environment, with simple yet flexible customization. It gets out of my way and works exactly as I want it to. I've been using it for years, and don't have the need to switch to anything else. I'm only hoping that something similar can exist for Wayland. Otherwise I don't see myself switching from X anytime soon. Please support the author if you have the means: https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm/blob/master/doc/CONTRIBUTING.md#donations https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm/blob/master/doc/CONTRIB...
- kevincali 4y ago
  Same for me. Using it for years and it's been extremely reliable on my desktop. Though I have to admit, that I miss a good DE integration for my laptop. I tried both Plasma and XFCE, but both of them have some quirks while having bspwm as the WM. Maybe I'll try out GNOME with Pop Shell. Seems pretty nice out of the box.

dinvlad 4y ago

Wolfgang's channel had an interesting take on it recently: "Tiling Window Managers suck. Here's why" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n_rl9jWUMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n_rl9jWUMo

mikenew 4y ago
He makes some great points and I can relate to most of them, but my god do I love my tiling window manager. There is nothing on earth that would convince me to go back to stacking. IMO, the key thing about tiling window managers is that if you configure it correctly, you always know where everything is, and you're only ever one or two keystrokes (or mouse clicks) away. For example, on my setup, workspace 8 is always Firefox. If I open workspace 8 and Firefox hasn't been launched yet it immediately opens. Workspace 7 is my meassaging app, 6 is discord, 1 is a terminal, and so on. Windows are never hidden behind each other so you never go hunting for anything. There's also a lot of little customization things that make it feel really nice. Like I can hit a hotkey to size a youtube video to a pixel-perfect, borderless 720p window with other windows filling space around it. Or a global hotkey to hide notifications for the next hour. I have a "get focused" hotkey that will lock the screen and require an admin password if I open the browser. TWMs are definitely not for everybody. But for me it removes a ton of frustration that I get with stacking window managers, and it lets me customize my own experience in ways that I find super valuable.
- indigodaddy 4y ago
  I like what you describe here...! I haven't been in Linux-land for awhile as I got a new Windows 11 laptop recentlyish and haven't put Linux on it yet, and my work laptop is Windows.. But for my new upcoming job they should be sending me a Macbook. Does the latest OS X have a workspace concept? If not is there an free application that can implement workspaces/desktops on OS X?
  - uberduper 4y ago
    OSX has a fantastic workspace implementation.

igetspam 4y ago

Lost me at "sloppy focus." I actually quite liked fvwm and use sloppy focus still. I've become too lazy to bother knowing which WM is running on my machine but the lack of sloppy focus is the single feature that has prevented me from using Apple products forever. (I think the UX sucks too but if the focus worked as I wanted and the window management was a multi layered disaster, I could cope.)

thanatos519 4y ago
For me, it's lack of sloppy focus and the mandatory raise-on-focus. I regularly have small utility windows floating in front of terminals or browsers and I don't want a click on those big windows to pull them in front of the small windows. I hear iTerm has sloppy focus between its own windows, but ... that's not enough, is it?
tux2bsd 4y ago
WindowMaker does sloppy focus very well.

leephillips 4y ago

Once I tried dwm, I never looked back.

0des 4y ago

The older I get, the more I get the urge to return to monke, and just use tmux. Maybe on friday I go all out and boot up a GUI with some type of nifty nature wallpapers showing through my terminals. FVWM is completely legit as well, albeit a little heavy when compared to TWM or my favorite Rio, with Acme of course. Heavy is relative in this sense, I've run FVWM on reprogrammed childrens toys with the processing power of a warm potato.

michaelcampbell 4y ago
I went on a wm hunt in the early/mid 90's as well on my (company provided) SPARCStation. I went through all I could find and compile, but I landed on either fvwm or twm; the memory escapes me. I remember an interesting one ("piewm"?) that had its menus originate radially like pie-slices instead of a dropdown to the right; the theory being that you would have to move your mouse less to get to any given option. I honestly don't understand the OP's hatred of fvwm, but people like different things.
amelius 4y ago
How about a WM-equivalent of tmux, where you can put graphical windows into a detached state, and open them on a different computer?
- 0des 4y ago
  welcome to plan9, there is cake and napalm at the table by the door.
NoGravitas 4y ago
I actually really liked TWM, and thought it was distinctly underrated.

eximius 4y ago

I just need Awesome ported to Wayland, but it's apparently difficult for Wayland reasons I no longer recall.

kaba0 4y ago
I don’t think there is anything in wayland that would make the porting hard.
- herewulf 4y ago
  Depends on how tightly coupled the WM is to X. My chosen tiling WM (StumpWM) is not easily portable. The development discussion has been that it's easier to rewrite. I used xmonad for years before that.. Well, it's in the name. It's not getting ported to Wayland. Not easily anyway.
- eximius 4y ago
  Hm, I might be conflating the only project I was aware of that was trying to do that... with the problems they ran into with Rust/Wayland interop. Wayland has lifecycle assumptions that break Rust's assumptions without a gratuitous amount of unergonomic wrapper code, or something. (Which is concerning in some ways...)
- pengaru 4y ago
  Porting a plain Xlib/xcb window manager to wayland is a mountain of work. Just look at wlroots to get a sense of how much code one has to write (or embrace in the form of wlroots) that an X11 WM largely doesn't need concern itself with.
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  What's hard is rewriting from scratch starting at a lower level.
  - NoGravitas 4y ago
    I think anyone trying to write a Wayland compositor at this point, especially if they are rewriting an X window manager, should be using WLRoots. I don't /think/ writing a compositor with WLRoots is lower level that writing an X wm in, say, XCB.

beej71 4y ago

I must have run fvwm for a decade before switching to xfce. I do kinda miss it, so lightweight. But I really also appreciate a lot of things xfce makes easier.

heywoodlh 4y ago

I used to be a huge i3 user (and sometimes I give in to the temptation to load it up and mess with my config). I love tweaking my desktop to make it look like it should be on /r/unixporn. However, there are certain desktop things I don't enjoy messing with at all: - audio - displays - bluetooth Audio is especially confusing on Linux because there are so many parts to one system. Even after researching PulseAudio, ALSA, Pipewire, Jack, etc. it is super hard for me to know exactly what does what on my Linux machines. I found that with i3 I often spent more time tweaking my desktop than actually doing work. However, I think that tweaking like this is actually super fun and educational on how Linux display stuff works -- I would never discourage someone from taking the time to mess around with i3, bspwm, or an alternative. My perfect balance is GNOME plus the Pop! OS shell extension[1]. I'm not a Pop! OS user (and likely never will be) but I loooove having tiling in GNOME and being able to have all the stuff I don't like to manage just work. [1] https://github.com/pop-os/shell https://github.com/pop-os/shell EDIT: minor grammar tweak

darthrupert 4y ago
Audio is fixed by just using pipewire. Displays is fixed by using Wayland (sway). Bluetooth is indeed an unsolved problem. I suppose the skilled hacker types have just declared the whole protocol as broken and use wires.
- kaba0 4y ago
  Pipewire “solves”, or at least improves the bluetooth landscape quite a bit. Do I read parent as saying that these things are best managed through GUI widgets attached to the desktop environment
  - heywoodlh 4y ago
    > Do I read parent as saying that these things are best managed through GUI widgets attached to the desktop environment 100% you are reading my original comment correctly. An example I ran into recently: I start up bluetoothctl, I power on the adapter, start scanning for Blueooth devices and am spammed by a bluetooth device nearby to the point where I can't see the one I am trying to pair to (even after turning off scanning). In contrast, blueman-applet or GNOME's control-center neatly organizes each unique Bluetooth device as individual icons and makes it easy to see each of those. Lots of little papercuts like that can make it frustrating when you're just trying to get work done. This is also true things like displays -- sure I could take 20 minutes write a script to rearrange my displays the way I prefer -- or I could just open GNOME's control center and take two minutes using the display setting. There are lots of little things like this that can get in the way when you just need to get something done. And this is totally subjective to my experience, my opinion and what I currently value so please don't take this like I am saying everyone should prioritize things the way I do. For those more comfortable in i3 or something else -- great! :)

forgotmypw17 4y ago

There are two main things I want from the wm on my workstation: plainness and stability. I want plainness because the wm is just framing my applications, not the main atteaction. I want stability because my workstation should not be rearranged without my consent or request. After a long time looking, I'm happy for a while now. IMO, other than the small additions of being able to toggle "on top" and virtual desktops, Windows 95 pretty much did it as far as a functional, efficient, and subtly stylish UI. Mac 8 is not bad either, but didn't have the keyboard accessibility.

thom 4y ago

I remember back in the 90s caring about window managers and playing with Enlightenment and its weird wavy desktop. It was cool because it was different. I used Blackbox throughout university because we were all on a shared server doing remote X sessions and everyone loading KDE at the start of a lesson would slow it to a crawl. But then I got two monitors and a job and stopped caring. I need virtual desktops, a launcher, and a good settings app. I’ve never tiled windows outside of Emacs, which runs full screen on one monitor opposite a browser on the other monitor. I’m baffled by people who need to have seven terminals open alongside a tiny YouTube video. Either watch the video or do some work.

hn1337 4y ago
That's a common argument which is essentially, "I grew up and needed to be productive so that's why I don't use tiling window managers." It's ironic and silly because I use a tiling window manager to _be_ productive. I have used the same settings, window manager and configuration since 2006. That is exactly why I love it, it's stable as can be and I can rely on it forever (at least until X11 doesn't work anymore, but I will probably be dead by then).
- forgotpwd16 4y ago
  Which window manager? I think only ratpoison, larswm, and Ion existed back then? As for X11, recently changes were added to Xwayland's rootfull mode to allow running a full X environment on Wayland.
  - scbrg 4y ago
    Both dwm and wmii existed in 2006.
  - hn1337 4y ago
    I use dwm, in particular a Debian netinstall with no desktop environment. Simply install X and dwm. I have my own fork of dwm with my customizations on a separate branch. I can update dwm by pulling master and rebasing my branch on master. Has worked since 2006. With that being said, dwm hasn't changed much since 2006.

thanatos519 4y ago

I still <3 sawfish for its fine-grained mouse+keyboard shortcut customization, regex-matching per-window behaviour modification, zoom-to-fill-space, and easy themeing ... but it's rusty, bordering on abandonware, and mate's marco is good enough with the sloppy focus and no-raise-on-focus-or-click that I require.

toomim 4y ago
Sawfish was my favorite all-time wm, but it doesn't work well now. :-(

kstenerud 4y ago

I really liked AmigaOS 3.x. It was (for the time) pleasant to look at, had decent contrast, and generally got out of your way. But Windows 95 was better. MUCH higher contrast, very clear delineation between controls, and consistency of operations. Plus you could resize windows from any corner! Then Windows XP came along and ruined everything. And the Windows UI continued to go downhill from there. At least it came with a "classic" theme for awhile. Then I switched to MacOS Leopard. It was nice overall, but going back to menus at the top of the screen felt like a step backwards. At least it had contrast and clear delineation between controls, so I was on the whole happy. Then they started to flatten things, reduce contrast, and generally make a pig's breakfast of everything. Now I've settled on Mate Desktop. It's mostly there, better in some ways, worse in others. But overall it's pleasant to work with, low impact, and gets out of your way. And at the end of the day that's all I really wanted.

mst 4y ago

http://trout.me.uk/X11/fvwm2rc http://trout.me.uk/X11/fvwm2rc Plus '#ffee66' for http://trout.me.uk/X11/xclus http://trout.me.uk/X11/xclus will result in: http://trout.me.uk/screenshot4.png http://trout.me.uk/screenshot4.png Everybody else's mileage will definitely vary. ("real" GUI wise, I still miss RISC OS ;)

winReInstall 4y ago

It might sound stupid, but is there a visual equivalent to linux pipes? As in, i have a software that has something iterratable (browser search result, fileexplorer, document) and these result "plop" out into a visual pipe, were they get filtered (either by hand or by some NN-magic or by code) and processed by other pipleline parts. Finally the result drops out into a Folder, a File, a SnyDrive or some CMS system. I just want to have that factorio overview over my whole workprocess pipeline and everything stuck in it. Inclusive rerouting capability. That would be supersweet. Has that ever been attempted?

dmfay 4y ago
I haven't tried it myself yet but https://arcan-fe.com/2021/04/12/introducing-pipeworld/ https://arcan-fe.com/2021/04/12/introducing-pipeworld/ has been on my radar for a while.
pyinstallwoes 4y ago
Yeah I think something like Slurp in Plan 9 is that.

amelius 4y ago

Please give me a button in the top-bar of every window that will disable all keyboard and mouse input to that window. Another request (which I know is more difficult to implement) is to have a button in the top-bar that mutes the audio of that window.

bigpeopleareold 4y ago

KDE Plasma (of course with kwin :D) is good enough for Linuxes (Kubuntu for me to be precise). My own jury is still out on how well it works on FreeBSD - which I am more attentive over, but I seen kwin use a lot of CPU for periods of time, spinning up the fans after a resume. But that was before I lowered the scheduling threshold from the recommendation ... but otherwise, it works fine. But I settled because I really just don't care enough to optimize this part of my computing workflow. I guess the hip thing to describe it now here on HN is to call it "boring" ... to me, it is quite boring. :) I recommended KDE to a co-worker when deciding to use Ubuntu to get a Windows-y feel. So far, he's been happy with it too.

marcodiego 4y ago

One thing I miss from those times: themes with textures for your windows. I wouldn't use it since they look distracting but they were beautiful.

teddyh 4y ago

My first window manager (on Unix) was Open Look Window Manager (olwm, later olvwm), since this was the default when starting Open Windows on SunOS 4 in 1992. After a few years of mostly using the Open Windows tools, including using MailTool for e-mail, I went through a process of trying to pare down my tooling dependencies to the bare minimum, in order to be able to discover what my actual needs were, so that I could choose better tools appropriately. This included switching from MailTool to Unix mail(1), and using twm(1) as a Window Manager (Not a tiled window manager; the Tab Window Manager, i.e. the basic window manager which was and is included in the standard X11 distribution). I have since switched to more capable mail readers, etc. but I continue to use twm as a window manager to this day. I have found that I simply don’t need anything more than that.

Pakdef 4y ago

I really like tiling window managers but they have too many bugs to be usable... In the meantime I use XFCE and snap windows to quarter, half or full screen