9 ms·

goomwwm: Get out of my way, Window Manager

85 points by udp 14y ago

avelis 14y ago
This reminds me of Divvy for OS X. Once I started using Divvy I couldn't go back. http://mizage.com/divvy/ http://mizage.com/divvy/
drek 14y ago
Looks cool, but what's up with the source being just one 4k line C file?
- buro9 14y ago
  It isn't: https://github.com/seanpringle/goomwwm/blob/master/goomwwm.c https://github.com/seanpringle/goomwwm/blob/master/goomwwm.c
  - drek 14y ago
    Umm yeah that's a 4k line C file?
    - munchor 14y ago
      What matters is size, not lines. You can just inline everything and it'll be like 3 lines of code.
      - tikhonj 14y ago
        It's a question of readability and code organization, not sheer size.
- r4pha 14y ago
  dwm is a really nice tiling window manager and is even smaller: https://github.com/sr/dwm/blob/master/dwm.c https://github.com/sr/dwm/blob/master/dwm.c
- jrockway 14y ago
  It's all going to end up in the same executable anyway!
- to3m 14y ago
  Some people like it that way! Also, it's 3,727 lines.
wickedchicken 14y ago
Interesting. I use Awesome[1] daily, and it's pretty great, but I wish it had less flexible layouts and more grid-like ones. Actually, what I've been contemplating writing for a while is a window manager that notices what windows you have open, clusters those into sets (windows may be in multiple sets!), creates workspaces based on these clusters, automatically flips between these clusters when it senses you're switching to another one, and attempts to display windows as disconnected floating golden rectangles (still 2d, but not encompassing every pixel on your screen). I really really hate managing windows... [1] http://awesome.naquadah.org/ http://awesome.naquadah.org/
- r4pha 14y ago
  I, too, use awesome daily. I might be wrong, but I guess the i3 window manager can group windows in a 'tabbed' style and other interesting stuff. I tried it for some time, but didn't really dig the way it handles two monitors. Apart from that, it seems to be a great alternative to awesome wm.
  - sciurus 14y ago
    Yes, in i3 you can switch a container between tiled (the default), tabbed, and stacked layouts. I actually like i3's handling of two monitors a lot [0]; workspaces are global and can be created on either monitor. For me that's easy to understand and fits my work style (one workspace with email and IM on one monitor, multiple workspaces with terminals and web browsers on the other). My only complaint with i3 is how the concept of splitting and changing tiling orientation between horizontal and vertical are intertwined. [1] I think it would be much more intuitive to have two tiling layouts (horizontal and vertical), a single kind of split that is only responsible for splitting, and no separate concept of orientation. To help myself get used to i3, I wrote myself this small program for visualize the tree structure of my containers. [2] [0] http://i3-wm.org/docs/userguide.html#multi_monitor http://i3-wm.org/docs/userguide.html#multi_monitor [1] http://i3-wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_orientation_and_split_containers http://i3-wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_orientation_and_split_... [2] https://github.com/sciurus/i3tree https://github.com/sciurus/i3tree
- planckscnst 14y ago
osxwm 14y ago
I'm new to (learning) programming and already need to manage windows better. I knew I had this need, but I did not know what this was called until seeing GOOMWWM's screenshots. I'm on OSX. I typically have Firefox, Terminal, and TextWrangler open while I work through Zed Shaw's LPtHW course. What window manager should I use?
- rpicard 14y ago
  I think that the window manager is a little lower-level than what you're thinking of. If you're running a Mac, you would already have whatever proprietary program Apple uses in OS/X to display windows and the desktop environment. This is my understanding at least.
  - osxwm 14y ago
    Thanks for clarifying that, Robert. The whatever proprietary program Apple uses in OS/X isn't cutting it for me. I spend too much time getting the windows how I want them and it's never quite right. I would like to automatically tessellate my windows as seen in the GOOMWWM. Is there a way to do that in OSX, and if so, what is this type of software called?
    - wazoox 14y ago
      I suppose using X11 on OS X it must be possible to use another WM than the one provided by Apple (quartz-wm). After all, they're providing twm, so there must be a way to run it.
      - tikhonj 14y ago
        I think this is exactly correct. My understanding is that you can run a window manager like XMonad (and, in fact, I've met people who do) but then you will only be able to use X programs and not native Mac ones. If all you need is a terminal emulator, a browser and a text editor then this would work perfectly.
    - avelis 14y ago
tluyben2 14y ago
I still use Ratpoison. This looks interesting ; I like that people still actually make window managers. Probably a lot of creative work can be put into that.
- dsrguru 14y ago
  Have you considered upgrading to stumpwm by the same author? It has all the features ratpoison does plus support for floating layout via gnew-float, among other things. And it's written in Common Lisp, so you can hack/customize/extend it as easily as [if not more so than] emacs.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
leephillips 14y ago
The tutorial[1] makes me consider trying something besides dwm[2] for the first time in years. There are some neat ideas there. [1]http://aerosuidae.net/goomwwm/tutorial http://aerosuidae.net/goomwwm/tutorial [2]http://dwm.suckless.org/ http://dwm.suckless.org/
hello_asdf 14y ago
Take a look at tinywm to get an idea of the basics behind writing your own window manager. I'm using evilwm, and have been for years. However, I've tried about 15 different tiling window managers, and I have yet to find one that suits my needs perfectly. I stayed with subtle for about a week, but it just wasn't for me.
- lsh 14y ago
  Link for TinyWM: http://incise.org/tinywm.html http://incise.org/tinywm.html
- Teapot 14y ago
  I used evilwm for several years back on RedHat 7.x. I've been stuck on XP since. I fondly remember the fun of exploring just how stripped-down WM i could practically use. And how tiny resources it used. http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/ http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/ it's a massive 40k download.
munchor 14y ago
When will there be a window manager that supports GTK3?
- naner 14y ago
  GTK3 is a widget toolkit. Most window managers, especially tiling window managers, don't draw any widgets (or draw their own simple widgets when necessary). The window managers that are part of the Gnome desktops (Metacity, Gnome Shell, Unity) do link with the respective versions of GTK (GTK2 for Metacity, GTK3 for the other two) to draw menus, etc. All X11 window managers are capable of managing GTK3 applications.
  - gue5t 14y ago
    A caveat: GTK3 brought a lot of changes in GTK/GDK internals including how window sizing was handled, both based on widget size requirements and based on user interactions for resizing. This was intended in part to provide better support for WM paradigms like Windows and Wayland where clients have more control of their own size, and resulted in UI additions like resize grips by default in the corner of windows. It also cleaned up the code to be less semantically tied to X11's windowing rules. In many cases it's more efficient to use a single toplevel window and do logic application-side than make the X server work harder (due to context switches and changes in rendering codepaths). The downside to these changes is that several GTK3 features were horribly broken outside of GNOME's default window manager. I've seen at least five or six window managers that would freeze applications with the mouse grabbed as of GTK3.2: click on the wrong part of a menubar or on the resize corner and you had to resort to the keyboard to kill the offending application before it or your mouse would work. Version 3.4 or thereabouts has fixed these bugs for the most part; even window managers that don't support much in the way of ClientMessage-based window manager protocols should work fine now. But for some time GTK3 did interact very poorly with most window managers. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=630972 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=630972 That this was so hairy and bug-prone is, in my opinion, a symptom of interacting with the ugly beast that is X11. If you read the code of the affected window managers and GTK, you would probably agree.
Joeboy 14y ago
Can anybody tell me what this has that dwm doesn't? A run-time config file I guess, but you don't generally need to reconfigure your wm once you've got it working in a way you're comfortable with.
phzbOx 14y ago
I'm surprised nobody said a word about stumpwm yet (http://stumpwm.org http://stumpwm.org). It's a lisp window manager built with the mentality of rat poison. The great thing about it is how it integrate with emacs/slime. For instance, let's say you want to close all the windows from the second/third workspace, you write the code in emacs and evaluate it in the context of stumpwm.
plg 14y ago
xmonad http://xmonad.org/ http://xmonad.org/
- zaphar 14y ago
  the link is cool and all but why don't you tell us why you like it? I use it constantly and have invested quite a bit of time in my .xmonad.hs file but I'm interested in hearing why other people like it as well. For myself I love that I can basically code my own wm and make it what I want. It's like a wm toolkit. I also like that it keeps my haskell chops from rusting too much.
dkersten 14y ago
I've been using Sean's previous window manager, musca[1], since early 2009 and love it. Interesting to see what else he's come up with! I just read through the tutorial and in a lot of ways this is very like musca. Similar commands (some are identical, in fact), similar config file etc. It also looks more flexible and powerful than musca! I will definitely be trying this out. Perhaps I've found my new WM... [1] http://aerosuidae.net/ http://aerosuidae.net/
lsh 14y ago
I loved Ion (http://tuomov.iki.fi/software/ http://tuomov.iki.fi/software/) to death back in the day and for a few years was floating in limbo after it's author went weird about it's licensing. I'm pleased to say that there is now Notion (not ion): http://notion.sourceforge.net/ http://notion.sourceforge.net/ Notion is a fork of an earlier version of Ion with a more permissible license but behaves and looks exactly like Ion always did. Notion and Ion were so-called stacked tiling window managers, their position and layout were not fixed in patterns of dividing the screen up like (iirc) Awesome and XMonad.
- dwc 14y ago
  Same story here, regarding Ion. A guy I know who also used Ion said that's enough, we can't find a replacement so let's write one. I helped a bit. It does what we need, it's fast, and it's easy to configure. https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/spectrwm https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/spectrwm
zobzu 14y ago
For me "get out of my way" means i don't wanna have to configure-reconfigure-rereconfigure it every week and i don't wanna have to learn a new language for that. I don't wanna have to go through a "video" (hi nwm) to show me how it works. I'm ok with a 5min first time setup and 5min reading the man page, then that's it. Most tiling and "minimalistic" wms fail at that. So i'm using KDE/XFCE/etc. Heck, KDE's kwin tiling mode is just fine.
- johnchristopher 14y ago
  For what it's worth: I read on his blog that the original author of awesome-wm (j. danjou) stated in an interview that he used awesome with the default rc pretty much untouched (some people on the mailing list are heavily modifying it). Moreover, awesome is "pluggable" into classic gnome 2.x
  - zobzu 14y ago
    Ive tried countless times but i can't satisfy myself with defaults on awesomewm. always have to tweak it and it takes a while. Incidently awesomewm configuration system is extremely powerful. But I don't wanna "waste" hours on that anymore (that is, all the wm config in general). If KDE brings too many troubles (the config is dead easy but it has other quirks, like memory usage, bugs, etc), I might just go back to the trusty window maker. Simple, easy. Maybe the way it should always have been ;-)
- jhdevos 14y ago
  For me, awesome was the first window manager that I liked without having to tweak much. I did eventually tweak little things, but that is a very slow process happening over a long period -- the default config works well enough for me.
dsrguru 14y ago
For those of us who don't have an available modifier key (or at least one that's accessible without looking down at the keyboard), is there a way to use a prefix key à la ratpoison and stumpwm? There's a patch for dwm that provides that functionality, so I assume it wouldn't be hard to add for goomwwm if it's not currently supported.
Nick_C 14y ago
I've been using spectrwm (www.spectrwm.org), which was called scrotwm, for a couple of years now. I switched from musca (Sean's previous wm), mainly because musca didn't handle full-screen apps very well. It has been pretty rock solid. I like that a window can float if you want, it is good for watching something with mplayer. It is written by a BSD guy and the code is nice and easy to follow if you want to see some X11 programming.
nickaugust 14y ago
dwm <3

85 points by udp 14y ago

This reminds me of Divvy for OS X. Once I started using Divvy I couldn't go back. http://mizage.com/divvy/ http://mizage.com/divvy/

drek 14y ago

Looks cool, but what's up with the source being just one 4k line C file?

buro9 14y ago
It isn't: https://github.com/seanpringle/goomwwm/blob/master/goomwwm.c https://github.com/seanpringle/goomwwm/blob/master/goomwwm.c
- drek 14y ago
  Umm yeah that's a 4k line C file?
  - munchor 14y ago
    What matters is size, not lines. You can just inline everything and it'll be like 3 lines of code.
    - tikhonj 14y ago
      It's a question of readability and code organization, not sheer size.
r4pha 14y ago
dwm is a really nice tiling window manager and is even smaller: https://github.com/sr/dwm/blob/master/dwm.c https://github.com/sr/dwm/blob/master/dwm.c
jrockway 14y ago
It's all going to end up in the same executable anyway!
to3m 14y ago
Some people like it that way! Also, it's 3,727 lines.

wickedchicken 14y ago

Interesting. I use Awesome[1] daily, and it's pretty great, but I wish it had less flexible layouts and more grid-like ones. Actually, what I've been contemplating writing for a while is a window manager that notices what windows you have open, clusters those into sets (windows may be in multiple sets!), creates workspaces based on these clusters, automatically flips between these clusters when it senses you're switching to another one, and attempts to display windows as disconnected floating golden rectangles (still 2d, but not encompassing every pixel on your screen). I really really hate managing windows... [1] http://awesome.naquadah.org/ http://awesome.naquadah.org/

r4pha 14y ago
I, too, use awesome daily. I might be wrong, but I guess the i3 window manager can group windows in a 'tabbed' style and other interesting stuff. I tried it for some time, but didn't really dig the way it handles two monitors. Apart from that, it seems to be a great alternative to awesome wm.
- sciurus 14y ago
  Yes, in i3 you can switch a container between tiled (the default), tabbed, and stacked layouts. I actually like i3's handling of two monitors a lot [0]; workspaces are global and can be created on either monitor. For me that's easy to understand and fits my work style (one workspace with email and IM on one monitor, multiple workspaces with terminals and web browsers on the other). My only complaint with i3 is how the concept of splitting and changing tiling orientation between horizontal and vertical are intertwined. [1] I think it would be much more intuitive to have two tiling layouts (horizontal and vertical), a single kind of split that is only responsible for splitting, and no separate concept of orientation. To help myself get used to i3, I wrote myself this small program for visualize the tree structure of my containers. [2] [0] http://i3-wm.org/docs/userguide.html#multi_monitor http://i3-wm.org/docs/userguide.html#multi_monitor [1] http://i3-wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_orientation_and_split_containers http://i3-wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_orientation_and_split_... [2] https://github.com/sciurus/i3tree https://github.com/sciurus/i3tree
planckscnst 14y ago

osxwm 14y ago

I'm new to (learning) programming and already need to manage windows better. I knew I had this need, but I did not know what this was called until seeing GOOMWWM's screenshots. I'm on OSX. I typically have Firefox, Terminal, and TextWrangler open while I work through Zed Shaw's LPtHW course. What window manager should I use?

rpicard 14y ago
I think that the window manager is a little lower-level than what you're thinking of. If you're running a Mac, you would already have whatever proprietary program Apple uses in OS/X to display windows and the desktop environment. This is my understanding at least.
- osxwm 14y ago
  Thanks for clarifying that, Robert. The whatever proprietary program Apple uses in OS/X isn't cutting it for me. I spend too much time getting the windows how I want them and it's never quite right. I would like to automatically tessellate my windows as seen in the GOOMWWM. Is there a way to do that in OSX, and if so, what is this type of software called?
  - wazoox 14y ago
    I suppose using X11 on OS X it must be possible to use another WM than the one provided by Apple (quartz-wm). After all, they're providing twm, so there must be a way to run it.
    - tikhonj 14y ago
      I think this is exactly correct. My understanding is that you can run a window manager like XMonad (and, in fact, I've met people who do) but then you will only be able to use X programs and not native Mac ones. If all you need is a terminal emulator, a browser and a text editor then this would work perfectly.
  - avelis 14y ago

tluyben2 14y ago

I still use Ratpoison. This looks interesting ; I like that people still actually make window managers. Probably a lot of creative work can be put into that.

dsrguru 14y ago
Have you considered upgrading to stumpwm by the same author? It has all the features ratpoison does plus support for floating layout via gnew-float, among other things. And it's written in Common Lisp, so you can hack/customize/extend it as easily as [if not more so than] emacs.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

leephillips 14y ago

The tutorial[1] makes me consider trying something besides dwm[2] for the first time in years. There are some neat ideas there. [1]http://aerosuidae.net/goomwwm/tutorial http://aerosuidae.net/goomwwm/tutorial [2]http://dwm.suckless.org/ http://dwm.suckless.org/

hello_asdf 14y ago

Take a look at tinywm to get an idea of the basics behind writing your own window manager. I'm using evilwm, and have been for years. However, I've tried about 15 different tiling window managers, and I have yet to find one that suits my needs perfectly. I stayed with subtle for about a week, but it just wasn't for me.

lsh 14y ago
Link for TinyWM: http://incise.org/tinywm.html http://incise.org/tinywm.html
Teapot 14y ago
I used evilwm for several years back on RedHat 7.x. I've been stuck on XP since. I fondly remember the fun of exploring just how stripped-down WM i could practically use. And how tiny resources it used. http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/ http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/ it's a massive 40k download.

munchor 14y ago

When will there be a window manager that supports GTK3?

naner 14y ago
GTK3 is a widget toolkit. Most window managers, especially tiling window managers, don't draw any widgets (or draw their own simple widgets when necessary). The window managers that are part of the Gnome desktops (Metacity, Gnome Shell, Unity) do link with the respective versions of GTK (GTK2 for Metacity, GTK3 for the other two) to draw menus, etc. All X11 window managers are capable of managing GTK3 applications.
- gue5t 14y ago
  A caveat: GTK3 brought a lot of changes in GTK/GDK internals including how window sizing was handled, both based on widget size requirements and based on user interactions for resizing. This was intended in part to provide better support for WM paradigms like Windows and Wayland where clients have more control of their own size, and resulted in UI additions like resize grips by default in the corner of windows. It also cleaned up the code to be less semantically tied to X11's windowing rules. In many cases it's more efficient to use a single toplevel window and do logic application-side than make the X server work harder (due to context switches and changes in rendering codepaths). The downside to these changes is that several GTK3 features were horribly broken outside of GNOME's default window manager. I've seen at least five or six window managers that would freeze applications with the mouse grabbed as of GTK3.2: click on the wrong part of a menubar or on the resize corner and you had to resort to the keyboard to kill the offending application before it or your mouse would work. Version 3.4 or thereabouts has fixed these bugs for the most part; even window managers that don't support much in the way of ClientMessage-based window manager protocols should work fine now. But for some time GTK3 did interact very poorly with most window managers. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=630972 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=630972 That this was so hairy and bug-prone is, in my opinion, a symptom of interacting with the ugly beast that is X11. If you read the code of the affected window managers and GTK, you would probably agree.

Joeboy 14y ago

Can anybody tell me what this has that dwm doesn't? A run-time config file I guess, but you don't generally need to reconfigure your wm once you've got it working in a way you're comfortable with.

phzbOx 14y ago

I'm surprised nobody said a word about stumpwm yet (http://stumpwm.org http://stumpwm.org). It's a lisp window manager built with the mentality of rat poison. The great thing about it is how it integrate with emacs/slime. For instance, let's say you want to close all the windows from the second/third workspace, you write the code in emacs and evaluate it in the context of stumpwm.

plg 14y ago

xmonad http://xmonad.org/ http://xmonad.org/

zaphar 14y ago
the link is cool and all but why don't you tell us why you like it? I use it constantly and have invested quite a bit of time in my .xmonad.hs file but I'm interested in hearing why other people like it as well. For myself I love that I can basically code my own wm and make it what I want. It's like a wm toolkit. I also like that it keeps my haskell chops from rusting too much.

dkersten 14y ago

I've been using Sean's previous window manager, musca[1], since early 2009 and love it. Interesting to see what else he's come up with! I just read through the tutorial and in a lot of ways this is very like musca. Similar commands (some are identical, in fact), similar config file etc. It also looks more flexible and powerful than musca! I will definitely be trying this out. Perhaps I've found my new WM... [1] http://aerosuidae.net/ http://aerosuidae.net/

lsh 14y ago

I loved Ion (http://tuomov.iki.fi/software/ http://tuomov.iki.fi/software/) to death back in the day and for a few years was floating in limbo after it's author went weird about it's licensing. I'm pleased to say that there is now Notion (not ion): http://notion.sourceforge.net/ http://notion.sourceforge.net/ Notion is a fork of an earlier version of Ion with a more permissible license but behaves and looks exactly like Ion always did. Notion and Ion were so-called stacked tiling window managers, their position and layout were not fixed in patterns of dividing the screen up like (iirc) Awesome and XMonad.

dwc 14y ago
Same story here, regarding Ion. A guy I know who also used Ion said that's enough, we can't find a replacement so let's write one. I helped a bit. It does what we need, it's fast, and it's easy to configure. https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/spectrwm https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/spectrwm

zobzu 14y ago

For me "get out of my way" means i don't wanna have to configure-reconfigure-rereconfigure it every week and i don't wanna have to learn a new language for that. I don't wanna have to go through a "video" (hi nwm) to show me how it works. I'm ok with a 5min first time setup and 5min reading the man page, then that's it. Most tiling and "minimalistic" wms fail at that. So i'm using KDE/XFCE/etc. Heck, KDE's kwin tiling mode is just fine.

johnchristopher 14y ago
For what it's worth: I read on his blog that the original author of awesome-wm (j. danjou) stated in an interview that he used awesome with the default rc pretty much untouched (some people on the mailing list are heavily modifying it). Moreover, awesome is "pluggable" into classic gnome 2.x
- zobzu 14y ago
  Ive tried countless times but i can't satisfy myself with defaults on awesomewm. always have to tweak it and it takes a while. Incidently awesomewm configuration system is extremely powerful. But I don't wanna "waste" hours on that anymore (that is, all the wm config in general). If KDE brings too many troubles (the config is dead easy but it has other quirks, like memory usage, bugs, etc), I might just go back to the trusty window maker. Simple, easy. Maybe the way it should always have been ;-)
jhdevos 14y ago
For me, awesome was the first window manager that I liked without having to tweak much. I did eventually tweak little things, but that is a very slow process happening over a long period -- the default config works well enough for me.

dsrguru 14y ago

For those of us who don't have an available modifier key (or at least one that's accessible without looking down at the keyboard), is there a way to use a prefix key à la ratpoison and stumpwm? There's a patch for dwm that provides that functionality, so I assume it wouldn't be hard to add for goomwwm if it's not currently supported.

Nick_C 14y ago

I've been using spectrwm (www.spectrwm.org), which was called scrotwm, for a couple of years now. I switched from musca (Sean's previous wm), mainly because musca didn't handle full-screen apps very well. It has been pretty rock solid. I like that a window can float if you want, it is good for watching something with mplayer. It is written by a BSD guy and the code is nice and easy to follow if you want to see some X11 programming.

nickaugust 14y ago

dwm <3