7 ms·

Xmonad 0.10 was released

134 points by vially 15y ago

LBarret 15y ago
xmonad is uber-wonderful but a good beginner documentation would be really awesome. I would like to have, on the official site, a list of distro, and for each, a tutorial that have been tested and works. Instead, one needs to hunt for blog post that are either incomplete or not applicable. The latest Ubuntu upgrade was really a nightmare in this respect. had to mix xfce + xmonad but my setup is far from optimal...
- exDM69 15y ago
  >> xmonad is uber-wonderful but a good beginner documentation would be really awesome. Why don't you write one? A lot of the xmonad (and other tiling wm) communities are battle scarred veterans who have been using dwm (the ancestor of xmonad, awesome et al) since day one and they don't need no stinking documentation :) And besides, one of the core ideas of dwm and (some of) it's successors is that the source code is the documentation. So if you're a newb and would belong to the target group of the docs you're requesting, you're the perfect individual to write them. I'm sure all the old timers on the IRC channel will be glad to help you to get started and will be even more delighted if you finish a doc.
  - aplusbi 15y ago
    Another one of the core ideas of dwm is "no noobs" which might explain the lack of documentation.
    - wyclif 15y ago
      If true (and I'm not sure it is), that's a shame, because it essentially means new adoption is discouraged, and that's death to a project.
      - qjz 15y ago
        Our project focuses on advanced and experienced computer users. In contrast with the usual proprietary software world or many mainstream open source projects that focus more on average and non-technical end users, we think that experienced users are mostly ignored. - from Suck Less Philosophy at http://suckless.org/manifest/ http://suckless.org/manifest/. I don't feel this translates to "no noobs" as much as it means "don't stop with the noobs." I'm pretty sure inexperienced users are welcome, but there's no interest in adding hand-holding features that conflict with the philosophy of "keeping things simple, minimal and usable." I use dwm & dmenu all the time, and have developed a real appreciation for the Suck Less approach (but I'm not a newbie, so I guess I'm safely in their target audience).
        aplusbi 15y ago
        dwm in particular mentions that it's elitist in order to prevent stupid questions from novices: Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it’s pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions. There are some distributions that provide binary packages though. Also anyone who has ever subscribed to the suckless mailing list can testify to the elitist sentiment among many of its users.
      - aplusbi 15y ago
        Anti-noob is perhaps a bit harsh, but dwm is definitely elitist. It is designed to keep its user base small (see my reply to qjz).
  - dons 15y ago
    xmonad is well documented: * http://xmonad.org/documentation.html http://xmonad.org/documentation.html E.g. * http://xmonad.org/tour.html http://xmonad.org/tour.html * http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Image:Xmbindings.png http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Image:Xmbindings.png It was always intended to be the antithesis of dwm in terms of friendliness and accessibility.
- gwern 15y ago
  I have heard good things in the past about beginners using Goerzen's tutorial: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive/John_Goerzen%27s_Configuration http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive/Joh...
makmanalp 15y ago
Installation: After you've gotten ghci and cabal from your favourite package manager, just do: > sudo cabal install xmonad xmonad-contrib Then you can get dmenu or dzen for a small menu and trayer for a small system tray. Then use a premade config file from here: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive and mess around with it. To learn the keybindings, print this out or make it your wallpaper: http://xmonad.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/xmonad-cheatsheet/ http://xmonad.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/xmonad-cheatsheet/ For them ubuntu users, if oneiric broke a lot of things you can follow this: http://markhansen.co.nz/xmonad-ubuntu-oneiric/ http://markhansen.co.nz/xmonad-ubuntu-oneiric/ That should allow you to select an xmonad session as opposed to a unity one during login. As a general rule you can simply use xmonad as your window manager and just launch gnome-settings-daemon (or was it gnome-config-daemon?) to get all the theming, font antialiasing, etc. If you run nm-applet manually, that should launch the networking stuff (if it didn't already). I haven't tried using xmonad with the ubuntu panel and stuff, so I don't know about that. Edit: I use this one: https://github.com/vicfryzel/xmonad-config https://github.com/vicfryzel/xmonad-config It works great with multiple monitors, alt+w and alt+e move focus between monitors, and then I can swap which workspace is in which monitor really easily to move things around.
- jamii 15y ago
  > I haven't tried using xmonad with the ubuntu panel and stuff, so I don't know about that. Use XMonad.Config.Gnome.gnomeConfig as your base config. Log in with gnome as normal and do: pkill metacity pkill compiz sleep 3 xmonad & Not the most elegant solution, but it works.
  - pyre 15y ago
    That worked with Gnome 2, but I'm not sure how well that will work with Gnome 3 and/or Unity. Unity is pretty tied to Compiz (some portion of it is implemented as a Compiz plugin). At this point, it's probably easier to either create your own session script to start up the parts of Gnome that you want along with XMonad (e.g. gnome-screensaver, gnome-power-manager, etc) or to see about using XMonad as the window manager for XFCE. Also, you used to be able to set the $WINDOW_MANAGER environment variable in ~/.gnomerc, to turn on XMonad as the window manager.
axk 15y ago
If you use Xmonad with GNOME 2/3 or Xfce, this panel applet/plugin can be handy: https://github.com/alexkay/xmonad-log-applet https://github.com/alexkay/xmonad-log-applet (disclaimer: I'm the current maintainer)
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
daleharvey 15y ago
My macbook died recently and I switched back to ubuntu for the week, first thing I did was install xmonad, its a really awesome environment to work within. I do wish it played nicer with other window environment, some applications just dont work inside a modal interface and when they dont I just want my normal windows with title bar and buttons back I havent installed it on my mac now its repaired, the fact I dont be able to use my normal mac apps kinda put me off, but I may give it another shot, if there was a way to have xmonad like behaviour with mac applications while preserving floating windows I would be in heaven (divvy etc most certainly do not count) Its probably worth mentioning that despite following several tutorials, getting xmonad installed on 11.04 was a nightmare that left plain ubuntu pretty broken, I would like to see that process improved as well
- pyre 15y ago
  > just want my normal windows with title bar and > buttons back There are contrib packages that allow you to add small title bars to the windows. You could configure XMonad with a 'floating' workspace, and enable title bars on all of the windows in that workspace. Then just setup rules to automatically send all of the programs that have issues to that workspace.
  - phillmv 15y ago
    I love how a "customizable tiling window manager" somehow requires the user to learn an unusual programming language and a dozen of inscrutable keyboard shortcuts. It made my 24inch screen at the time far more manageable but it was supremely frustrating if I sometimes wanted a certain window to remain in a certain position without being disturbed.
    - dons 15y ago
      > "customizable tiling window manager" somehow requires the user to learn an unusual programming language and a dozen of inscrutable keyboard shortcuts Languages are our best tool for expressivity. And a well-designed language is better than an ad hoc configuration language any day of the week (see e.g. vimscript for how not to do configuration). By choosing to use a full language for configuration, we have made possible an enormous ecosystem of user-contributed components -- because the configuration language was rich enough to support them.
burgerbrain 15y ago
Is there a compelling reason for somebody already using Awesome WM to look into Xmonad? Seems like I'm hearing about it more often these days.
- daniel_solano 15y ago
  I am an Xmonad user that tried Awesome, and the main thing that didn't work for me is that it seemed that Awesome workspaces (tags) were tied to particular monitors. Perhaps I just didn't take the time to figure out how to do it properly, but that was a deal-breaker for me. In Xmonad, I have configured twenty different workspaces, and I can easily swap them in and out of any given monitor. With a triple-monitor configuration, this is quite handy.
  - dfc 15y ago
    That's what did it for me too. I'm sure there is a way in awesome to do it but its not as easy as xmonad. Xmonad seems to not get in the way as much as awesome. For my purposes xmonad is just a lot simpler, but I am sure I am barely scratching the surface feature wise. A lot of the awesome docs/screenshots reminded me of enlightenment-porn back when e17 seemed like vaporware. I don't need crazy graphs/apps/eye-candy just help me arrange organize my windows and go away.
    - Symmetry 15y ago
      The crazy stuff doesn't come with a base awesome install, that's stuff people added on their own. The base install looks like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Awesome_screenshot.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Awesome_screenshot.png XMonad _is_ simpler, since awesome comes with a taskbar, system tray, and clock by default.
- pyre 15y ago
  Maybe Awesome is more stable now, but one of the reasons that I (and people I know) gave up on Awesome was how often the configuration interface changed, even once they switched it to Lua, the API would change between point releases. If I upgrade from XMonad 0.9 => 0.10, I don't have to completely redo my config file, because a good portion of the API has changed.
raphinou 15y ago
Is there an official announcement somewhere? The Xmonad blog seems dead, and the twitter account is not in a better state. It's a pitty because it gives the impression that the project is not actively developed.
- dons 15y ago
  There will be shortly. Sorry about the lack of noise online -- I switched jobs and cities, and haven't had time to do some of this kind of stuff. Adam Vogt has taken over as maintainer, and will be following up with an announce.
- eschulte 15y ago
  #xmonad on IRC is always populated with friendly and helpful xmonad cognoscenti
wunki 15y ago
I'm also using XMonad on Arch Linux. I found it hard to setup correctly, but once it is, it's a real productivity booster. Firing up another terminal (Meta-Shift-Enter) and not worrying about it's position is a time saver. If you want to try it out, I can help you by reducing the time needed to set it up. My dotfiles are here: https://github.com/wunki/wunki-dotfiles https://github.com/wunki/wunki-dotfiles Best nuggets for your setup can be found in xmonad.hs, xinitrc and Xdefaults files.
- dons 15y ago
  The underlying design invariant was that you should always be able to predict exactly what the screen would look like, before you perform an action. I'm glad that's the result we've achieved.
wyclif 15y ago
Anybody have a link to some good screenshots of Xmonad 0.10?
- dhs 15y ago
  http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Screenshots http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Screenshots
dextorious 15y ago
I'll go tell my coworker. He's the one industry programmer who gives a shit about Haskell.
- dextorious 15y ago
  Looks like someone missed the reference: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-announce-discovery.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-...
  - ottbot 15y ago
    Providing a reference for your joke doesn't really change much. I don't think you were downvoted because anyone thought your comment need citations, or because they weren't sure if it was actually supposed to be a joke. Perhaps it was just a bit trite, and/or irrelevant.
    - dextorious 15y ago
      So would you say that the same goes for Steve's article --which makes exactly the same point?
moe 15y ago
I'm still sad that ion3 is getting so little love these days. It's easily the most advanced of the tiling wm crop, and by a long shot. Just some bullets: - Floating/tiled can co-exist on same workspace (just attach/detach as needed), can also trivially set filters to have e.g. all dialogs and "all gimp-windows" float automatically. - The tabbed frames metaphor is infinitely superior to the "one window per frame" metaphor that everyone else is stuck with. - All configuration and extension is lua. It's an absolute joy to work with. - Mouse works as expected. Just drag frames to resize the grid, drag titlebars to move windows into other frames, etc. Up to this day I don't understand how people put up with the obscure limitations of the other tiling wm's (foremost: the one window per frame constraint, forced set of layouts that never work quite right, etc. etc.)...
- dons 15y ago
  Most of the above list is actually supported by xmonad (and dwm, and awesome and ...). The two things that are really the defining characteristic of ion3 is that it is a user-defined layout (not a "dynamic" layout, a la xmonad), and that the clients are represented as a tree of windows, rather than e.g. a zipper or list of windows (which is how the nesting works). xmonad and its cohort basically make the proposition that user-defined layouts are inefficient, and you can be more productive with predictable, automated tiling. They directly opposed ion3 in that regard. Mouse, configuration, floating etc is all fairly standard everywhere.
  - moe 15y ago
    xmonad and its cohort basically make the proposition that user-defined layouts are inefficient Well, having worked with both I strongly disagree with that assumption. Of course it's all a matter of preference but I believe there's a lot of "you don't know what you're missing when you never had it" going on. I've yet to observe an awesome|wmii|xmonad user who doesn't constantly get into fights with the WM because they can't just quickly resize or re-order a few frames in a truly predictable way.
    - zargon 15y ago
pilooch 15y ago
been using xmonad for a couple of years. config is so minimal that it makes it vey simple to replicate the exact same environment on all my machines (laptops and desktops), with no ties to the underlying linux distribution.
postit 15y ago
I wish I could replace my osx window manager by xmonad =_)
jafour1 15y ago
Scrotwm is a small dynamic tiling window manager for X11. It tries to stay out of the way so that valuable screen real estate can be used for much more important stuff. It has sane defaults and does not require one to learn a language to do any configuration. It was written by hackers for hackers and it strives to be small, compact and fast. It was largely inspired by xmonad and dwm. Both are fine products but suffer from things like: crazy-unportable-language-syndrome, silly defaults, asymmetrical window layout, "how hard can it be?" and good old NIH. Nevertheless dwm was a phenomenal resource and many good ideas and code was borrowed from it. On the other hand xmonad has great defaults, key bindings and xinerama support but is crippled by not being written in C.

134 points by vially 15y ago

xmonad is uber-wonderful but a good beginner documentation would be really awesome. I would like to have, on the official site, a list of distro, and for each, a tutorial that have been tested and works. Instead, one needs to hunt for blog post that are either incomplete or not applicable. The latest Ubuntu upgrade was really a nightmare in this respect. had to mix xfce + xmonad but my setup is far from optimal...

exDM69 15y ago
>> xmonad is uber-wonderful but a good beginner documentation would be really awesome. Why don't you write one? A lot of the xmonad (and other tiling wm) communities are battle scarred veterans who have been using dwm (the ancestor of xmonad, awesome et al) since day one and they don't need no stinking documentation :) And besides, one of the core ideas of dwm and (some of) it's successors is that the source code is the documentation. So if you're a newb and would belong to the target group of the docs you're requesting, you're the perfect individual to write them. I'm sure all the old timers on the IRC channel will be glad to help you to get started and will be even more delighted if you finish a doc.
- aplusbi 15y ago
  Another one of the core ideas of dwm is "no noobs" which might explain the lack of documentation.
  - wyclif 15y ago
    If true (and I'm not sure it is), that's a shame, because it essentially means new adoption is discouraged, and that's death to a project.
    - qjz 15y ago
      Our project focuses on advanced and experienced computer users. In contrast with the usual proprietary software world or many mainstream open source projects that focus more on average and non-technical end users, we think that experienced users are mostly ignored. - from Suck Less Philosophy at http://suckless.org/manifest/ http://suckless.org/manifest/. I don't feel this translates to "no noobs" as much as it means "don't stop with the noobs." I'm pretty sure inexperienced users are welcome, but there's no interest in adding hand-holding features that conflict with the philosophy of "keeping things simple, minimal and usable." I use dwm & dmenu all the time, and have developed a real appreciation for the Suck Less approach (but I'm not a newbie, so I guess I'm safely in their target audience).
      - aplusbi 15y ago
        dwm in particular mentions that it's elitist in order to prevent stupid questions from novices: Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it’s pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions. There are some distributions that provide binary packages though. Also anyone who has ever subscribed to the suckless mailing list can testify to the elitist sentiment among many of its users.
    - aplusbi 15y ago
      Anti-noob is perhaps a bit harsh, but dwm is definitely elitist. It is designed to keep its user base small (see my reply to qjz).
- dons 15y ago
  xmonad is well documented: * http://xmonad.org/documentation.html http://xmonad.org/documentation.html E.g. * http://xmonad.org/tour.html http://xmonad.org/tour.html * http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Image:Xmbindings.png http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Image:Xmbindings.png It was always intended to be the antithesis of dwm in terms of friendliness and accessibility.
gwern 15y ago
I have heard good things in the past about beginners using Goerzen's tutorial: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive/John_Goerzen%27s_Configuration http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive/Joh...

makmanalp 15y ago

Installation: After you've gotten ghci and cabal from your favourite package manager, just do: > sudo cabal install xmonad xmonad-contrib Then you can get dmenu or dzen for a small menu and trayer for a small system tray. Then use a premade config file from here: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive and mess around with it. To learn the keybindings, print this out or make it your wallpaper: http://xmonad.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/xmonad-cheatsheet/ http://xmonad.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/xmonad-cheatsheet/ For them ubuntu users, if oneiric broke a lot of things you can follow this: http://markhansen.co.nz/xmonad-ubuntu-oneiric/ http://markhansen.co.nz/xmonad-ubuntu-oneiric/ That should allow you to select an xmonad session as opposed to a unity one during login. As a general rule you can simply use xmonad as your window manager and just launch gnome-settings-daemon (or was it gnome-config-daemon?) to get all the theming, font antialiasing, etc. If you run nm-applet manually, that should launch the networking stuff (if it didn't already). I haven't tried using xmonad with the ubuntu panel and stuff, so I don't know about that. Edit: I use this one: https://github.com/vicfryzel/xmonad-config https://github.com/vicfryzel/xmonad-config It works great with multiple monitors, alt+w and alt+e move focus between monitors, and then I can swap which workspace is in which monitor really easily to move things around.

jamii 15y ago
> I haven't tried using xmonad with the ubuntu panel and stuff, so I don't know about that. Use XMonad.Config.Gnome.gnomeConfig as your base config. Log in with gnome as normal and do: pkill metacity pkill compiz sleep 3 xmonad & Not the most elegant solution, but it works.
- pyre 15y ago
  That worked with Gnome 2, but I'm not sure how well that will work with Gnome 3 and/or Unity. Unity is pretty tied to Compiz (some portion of it is implemented as a Compiz plugin). At this point, it's probably easier to either create your own session script to start up the parts of Gnome that you want along with XMonad (e.g. gnome-screensaver, gnome-power-manager, etc) or to see about using XMonad as the window manager for XFCE. Also, you used to be able to set the $WINDOW_MANAGER environment variable in ~/.gnomerc, to turn on XMonad as the window manager.

axk 15y ago

If you use Xmonad with GNOME 2/3 or Xfce, this panel applet/plugin can be handy: https://github.com/alexkay/xmonad-log-applet https://github.com/alexkay/xmonad-log-applet (disclaimer: I'm the current maintainer)

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

daleharvey 15y ago

My macbook died recently and I switched back to ubuntu for the week, first thing I did was install xmonad, its a really awesome environment to work within. I do wish it played nicer with other window environment, some applications just dont work inside a modal interface and when they dont I just want my normal windows with title bar and buttons back I havent installed it on my mac now its repaired, the fact I dont be able to use my normal mac apps kinda put me off, but I may give it another shot, if there was a way to have xmonad like behaviour with mac applications while preserving floating windows I would be in heaven (divvy etc most certainly do not count) Its probably worth mentioning that despite following several tutorials, getting xmonad installed on 11.04 was a nightmare that left plain ubuntu pretty broken, I would like to see that process improved as well

pyre 15y ago
> just want my normal windows with title bar and > buttons back There are contrib packages that allow you to add small title bars to the windows. You could configure XMonad with a 'floating' workspace, and enable title bars on all of the windows in that workspace. Then just setup rules to automatically send all of the programs that have issues to that workspace.
- phillmv 15y ago
  I love how a "customizable tiling window manager" somehow requires the user to learn an unusual programming language and a dozen of inscrutable keyboard shortcuts. It made my 24inch screen at the time far more manageable but it was supremely frustrating if I sometimes wanted a certain window to remain in a certain position without being disturbed.
  - dons 15y ago
    > "customizable tiling window manager" somehow requires the user to learn an unusual programming language and a dozen of inscrutable keyboard shortcuts Languages are our best tool for expressivity. And a well-designed language is better than an ad hoc configuration language any day of the week (see e.g. vimscript for how not to do configuration). By choosing to use a full language for configuration, we have made possible an enormous ecosystem of user-contributed components -- because the configuration language was rich enough to support them.

burgerbrain 15y ago

Is there a compelling reason for somebody already using Awesome WM to look into Xmonad? Seems like I'm hearing about it more often these days.

daniel_solano 15y ago
I am an Xmonad user that tried Awesome, and the main thing that didn't work for me is that it seemed that Awesome workspaces (tags) were tied to particular monitors. Perhaps I just didn't take the time to figure out how to do it properly, but that was a deal-breaker for me. In Xmonad, I have configured twenty different workspaces, and I can easily swap them in and out of any given monitor. With a triple-monitor configuration, this is quite handy.
- dfc 15y ago
  That's what did it for me too. I'm sure there is a way in awesome to do it but its not as easy as xmonad. Xmonad seems to not get in the way as much as awesome. For my purposes xmonad is just a lot simpler, but I am sure I am barely scratching the surface feature wise. A lot of the awesome docs/screenshots reminded me of enlightenment-porn back when e17 seemed like vaporware. I don't need crazy graphs/apps/eye-candy just help me arrange organize my windows and go away.
  - Symmetry 15y ago
    The crazy stuff doesn't come with a base awesome install, that's stuff people added on their own. The base install looks like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Awesome_screenshot.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Awesome_screenshot.png XMonad _is_ simpler, since awesome comes with a taskbar, system tray, and clock by default.
pyre 15y ago
Maybe Awesome is more stable now, but one of the reasons that I (and people I know) gave up on Awesome was how often the configuration interface changed, even once they switched it to Lua, the API would change between point releases. If I upgrade from XMonad 0.9 => 0.10, I don't have to completely redo my config file, because a good portion of the API has changed.

raphinou 15y ago

Is there an official announcement somewhere? The Xmonad blog seems dead, and the twitter account is not in a better state. It's a pitty because it gives the impression that the project is not actively developed.

dons 15y ago
There will be shortly. Sorry about the lack of noise online -- I switched jobs and cities, and haven't had time to do some of this kind of stuff. Adam Vogt has taken over as maintainer, and will be following up with an announce.
eschulte 15y ago
#xmonad on IRC is always populated with friendly and helpful xmonad cognoscenti

wunki 15y ago

I'm also using XMonad on Arch Linux. I found it hard to setup correctly, but once it is, it's a real productivity booster. Firing up another terminal (Meta-Shift-Enter) and not worrying about it's position is a time saver. If you want to try it out, I can help you by reducing the time needed to set it up. My dotfiles are here: https://github.com/wunki/wunki-dotfiles https://github.com/wunki/wunki-dotfiles Best nuggets for your setup can be found in xmonad.hs, xinitrc and Xdefaults files.

dons 15y ago
The underlying design invariant was that you should always be able to predict exactly what the screen would look like, before you perform an action. I'm glad that's the result we've achieved.

wyclif 15y ago

Anybody have a link to some good screenshots of Xmonad 0.10?

dhs 15y ago
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Screenshots http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Screenshots

dextorious 15y ago

I'll go tell my coworker. He's the one industry programmer who gives a shit about Haskell.

dextorious 15y ago
Looks like someone missed the reference: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-announce-discovery.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-...
- ottbot 15y ago
  Providing a reference for your joke doesn't really change much. I don't think you were downvoted because anyone thought your comment need citations, or because they weren't sure if it was actually supposed to be a joke. Perhaps it was just a bit trite, and/or irrelevant.
  - dextorious 15y ago
    So would you say that the same goes for Steve's article --which makes exactly the same point?

moe 15y ago

I'm still sad that ion3 is getting so little love these days. It's easily the most advanced of the tiling wm crop, and by a long shot. Just some bullets: - Floating/tiled can co-exist on same workspace (just attach/detach as needed), can also trivially set filters to have e.g. all dialogs and "all gimp-windows" float automatically. - The tabbed frames metaphor is infinitely superior to the "one window per frame" metaphor that everyone else is stuck with. - All configuration and extension is lua. It's an absolute joy to work with. - Mouse works as expected. Just drag frames to resize the grid, drag titlebars to move windows into other frames, etc. Up to this day I don't understand how people put up with the obscure limitations of the other tiling wm's (foremost: the one window per frame constraint, forced set of layouts that never work quite right, etc. etc.)...

dons 15y ago
Most of the above list is actually supported by xmonad (and dwm, and awesome and ...). The two things that are really the defining characteristic of ion3 is that it is a user-defined layout (not a "dynamic" layout, a la xmonad), and that the clients are represented as a tree of windows, rather than e.g. a zipper or list of windows (which is how the nesting works). xmonad and its cohort basically make the proposition that user-defined layouts are inefficient, and you can be more productive with predictable, automated tiling. They directly opposed ion3 in that regard. Mouse, configuration, floating etc is all fairly standard everywhere.
- moe 15y ago
  xmonad and its cohort basically make the proposition that user-defined layouts are inefficient Well, having worked with both I strongly disagree with that assumption. Of course it's all a matter of preference but I believe there's a lot of "you don't know what you're missing when you never had it" going on. I've yet to observe an awesome|wmii|xmonad user who doesn't constantly get into fights with the WM because they can't just quickly resize or re-order a few frames in a truly predictable way.
  - zargon 15y ago

pilooch 15y ago

been using xmonad for a couple of years. config is so minimal that it makes it vey simple to replicate the exact same environment on all my machines (laptops and desktops), with no ties to the underlying linux distribution.

postit 15y ago

I wish I could replace my osx window manager by xmonad =_)

jafour1 15y ago

Scrotwm is a small dynamic tiling window manager for X11. It tries to stay out of the way so that valuable screen real estate can be used for much more important stuff. It has sane defaults and does not require one to learn a language to do any configuration. It was written by hackers for hackers and it strives to be small, compact and fast. It was largely inspired by xmonad and dwm. Both are fine products but suffer from things like: crazy-unportable-language-syndrome, silly defaults, asymmetrical window layout, "how hard can it be?" and good old NIH. Nevertheless dwm was a phenomenal resource and many good ideas and code was borrowed from it. On the other hand xmonad has great defaults, key bindings and xinerama support but is crippled by not being written in C.