8 ms·

30 Window Managers in 30 Days

116 points by randallsquared 13y ago

pjmlp 13y ago
On my first GNU/Linux distribution I could only choose between twm, fwvm and OpenLook, boy am I old!
- Zardoz84 13y ago
  In my case, was twm, fwvm, fwvm95, kde , gnome 1.0 ... was SuSE 6.12 in the 1998's
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    Slackware 2.0 in 1995.
- 2ManyDogs 13y ago
  twm actually works quite well if you configure it to suit your needs.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    Well, when I saw twm for the first time, I already knew RiscOS, Atari ST GEM, Amiga Workbench, OS/2 PM, Desqview, Geoworks, Windows 3.x, Mac OS. So I wasn't that much impressed.
guylhem 13y ago
Glad to see some people are still using AfterStep. We put a lot of work into that - it was running just fine on my Toshiba 110CS, the main devel computer I used back in 2001 (and it was dated even back then - http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/8728/Toshiba-Satellite-110CS-810/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/8728/Toshiba-Satellit...) It was really fast and optimized back then. It should be blazing fast on modern hardware. EDIT - the review on http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=310500#p310500 http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=310500#p31050... mentions a slow start. Weird. It was globally as fast as fvwm and fvwm2, unless one started too many modules. I remember because I used them as benchmarks.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  It was my window manager around 1997-99.
- agumonkey 13y ago
  100MHz Pentium, what a nice constraint to work with.
  - chrissmeuk 13y ago
    A 100Mhz Pentium is a pretty fast machine believe it or not. I survived for a couple of years in the early 00's on a 133Mhz machine I found in a skip and chucked FreeBSD on it. I reckon I could get some mileage out of one even today.
  - endgame 13y ago
    Why is chrissmeuk's reply to you [dead], I wonder?
    - agumonkey 13y ago
      I don't know HN enough to guess, I was surprised too since it's dead but not removed so it asks for replies but (at least) I can't do that. I upvoted it in case it just needed to be in the positive, with no visible effect. Maybe he trolled on another thread and was punished ... anyway @chrissmeuk I understand pentium 100 are nice little cpus, I used a p2 350 for a loooong time, and I miss it a great deal since it was a real workhorse. And to clarify my first comment, I wish more people were programming on old machines, it's a good thing to avoid bloat.
      - guylhem 13y ago
        Indeed, working on a slow machine is the best thing one can do to produce optimized code. At the moment I'm using a macbookair3.1 with 4 gigs of ram- and it might even be too fast IMHO to add good constaints.
        13y ago
arocks 13y ago
In case you are wondering too, the author finally chose musca as his default WM: http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=206350#p206350 http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=206350#p20635...
- AmrMostafa 13y ago
  According to this[1], musca development halted since 2009. 1. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Musca https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Musca
  - swdunlop 13y ago
    That is not a bad thing in a window manager for people wanting an environment with few surprises. Openbox's development has been idle for years, but it where I go every time after I get bored with fighting GNOME3 or E17 on a new Linux install.
    - 2ManyDogs 13y ago
      Exactly. People like to point out that older window managers aren't in active development, as if this was a bad thing. To me it just means the WM is stable and doesn't need bug fixes.
      - kbenson 13y ago
        I've been migrating my Fvwm2 config (with alterations) for over a decade now. Whenever I see a new feature that's actually useful and not window dressing (ha), I generally spend a few hours to try to implement it, or my take on it. Generally, this works best when you combine it's scripting with external utilities. In this respect, it's the bash of window managers. Surprisingly, I've actually had people be genuinely surprised as some of the simpler things, such as binding the mail key on the dell keyboard I was using to slide toggle Thunderbird in and out of view (move from off-screen on right to 90% of current screen), regardless of which desktop I'm on.
rsync 13y ago
ion3, ftw, after all these years.
- codemac 13y ago
  Has anyone kept up with notion development?
  - dima55 13y ago
    I use notion, and will be for the foreseeable future. I suspect the article skipped it because it's in nonfree on Debian. This is due to Tuomo's funny licensing, and I don't think putting it there is fully justified, TBH. As for the development, there have been various bug fixes and some minor feature updates. It was and still is a fantastic WM
    - mcginleyr1 13y ago
      Wow I thought I was the only person still loving ion3 and notion. Notion has a few nice updates. Needs much more love.
      - mateuszf 13y ago
        Count one more - I also use it all the time when working under Linux. Haven't found anything close to it.
  - bnegreve 13y ago
    Nothing much [1] but it works fine. I use it everyday. [1] http://notion.sourceforge.net/#changes http://notion.sourceforge.net/#changes
- dnr 13y ago
  Yup, I've used ion2 → ion3 → notion pretty much exclusively for 10 or 11 years now. I don't think I could switch to another wm for my main interface if I wanted to. But why would I want to? Gimp was the only slightly-annoying thing, and now that has a single-window mode. I have only one feature request that I haven't figured out how to do myself: I want to hide the status bar (mod_statusbar) on certain workspaces (the ones that have a full-screen browser). Anyone have any ideas?
jensenbox 13y ago
These guys have been under a DDoS for days now. I have tried to get them to flip over to Cloudflare but no response. Even now, their forum is getting a HNDoS.
- D9u 13y ago
  The site loads for me...
  - jensenbox 13y ago
    I should have been more specific... Their repo is under DDoS http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=339366#p339366 http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=339366#p33936...
    - 2ManyDogs 13y ago
      There have been several responses to your requests to move to cloudflare. You have ignored them.
kunai 13y ago
Awww... no WindowMaker. This is one of the things that made me switch back to Linux from OS X. Inspired by this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6270254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6270254 I started running #! on a Tecra M2, and I now switch between the standard OpenBox config and dwm pretty constantly. The sheer feeling of freedom that you get from not being limited by a proprietary system where configuration is discouraged is one of the best parts of Linux and free software. In all honesty though, dwm, awesome, and i3 are probably my favorite picks for minimalism. There's just nothing that comes close to a hybrid/tiling WM in terms of efficiency. It's like vim. You don't ever realize how awful using the arrow keys and Ctrl-whatever was until you've tried HJKL and the massive amount of keybindings in vim, along with the endless configurability of your .vimrc. Floating WMs are convenient, but tiling WMs are just quality. On a 1024x768 screen, they save so much space that you never thought you needed.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  WindowMaker was quite nice, specially the docklets. It replaced AfterStep for me (around 1999) and I used it mainly until 2004. Nowadays I just use whatever is the default in any OS I use, as I no longer have the patient to tinker with settings.
  - kunai 13y ago
    Gnome 3 is turning out to be the best DE on any platform. It's by far the most polished and innovative I've seen. I never thought I'd say that 3 years ago.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    WindowMaker was quite nice Hey! It's not dead yet! (Entered from my WindowMaker desktop). Development's even restarted in the past year or so, after being on hiatus (other than bug support) since ~2005.
Touche 13y ago
Every time I use a tiling WM I think to myself "This would be incredible if I only used terminals and minimalist X apps (like xclock)". But the problem is web browsers feel extremely out of place in a tiling WM and I need web browsers so...
- tikhonj 13y ago
  Why do web browsers feel out of place? When I'm using a web browser, it's almost always either taking up a whole screen or exactly half of one--it may as well be tiled already! So when I switched to XMonad, using browsers still felt very natural. Perhaps it's just a cosmetic issue? For example, if you're using Chrome, you have to configure it to use system borders--otherwise it just looks wrong. I also set my Firefox up to be much more minimalistic, which looks much better with a tiling WM.
  - pbogdan 13y ago
    Could you share any details about your setup?
    - tikhonj 13y ago
      I didn't really do much customization. For FireFox, I just used a different theme and got rid of all the UI bits I didn't use. For Chrome, I only set it to use system borders. I didn't even configure XMonad very much--the defaults are very well thought out. In practice, it looks like this: Firefox: http://jelv.is/xmonad-ff.png http://jelv.is/xmonad-ff.png Chrome: http://jelv.is/xmonad-chrome.png http://jelv.is/xmonad-chrome.png Tiled: http://jelv.is/xmonad-tiled.png http://jelv.is/xmonad-tiled.png The only real problem I've had is that form widgets are rather ugly. I think this should be easy enough to change, I just haven't gotten around to it yet.
  - ics 13y ago
    Completely agree– I absolutely love having my browser tiled. Every time I look up and realize I'm still in OS X and can't split my browser window something twitches and I contemplate booting up a VM so it doesn't happen again while I'm in the zone. I'd also be interested in seeing what modifications you've made though– I don't think I configured very much and even though I don't use Chrom(ium) as my primary browser I never really took issue with the way it looked. In Firefox I just hide everything and use Pentadactyl.
D9u 13y ago
I noticed a couple of my favorites. Pekwm, and dwm. I wish that someone had done this list a few years ago, as the http://xwinman.org/ http://xwinman.org/ site is all I had to go on when I did my own WM search.
- 2ManyDogs 13y ago
  Thank you. Someone who isn't complaining that I didn't feature their favorite WM. :)
mkhattab 13y ago
Great list, although like most tools the full experience comes after spending a great deal of time tinkering with it. Two of my favorites on that list are awm (Awesome) and i3. I started with awm after using the mess that is Unity (Ubuntu) then switched to OSX. Then I started missing tiling window managers, so I started using spectacle, which is great. Recently my SSD failed on my MBA so I switched to Ubuntu and to the even greater mess than before, Unity. Apparently one needs SLI/Crossfire to get acceptable performance in Unity. So, I switched back awm which is still great but shit when it comes to multi-monitor support out of the box. Finally switched to i3. Moral of the story is one should use what works best for him/her as long as it's not Unity.
- gizmo686 13y ago
  I use Awesome with multiple monitors and have never noticed any difficulty. What does i3 do differently?
  - mkhattab 13y ago
    i3 will use different workspaces for each monitor. So if you have dual monitors by default, the primary monitor will be workspace 1 and the secondary will be workspace 2. Workspaces are created and destroyed as needed, that is they're existing only when windows are attached. One problem I had with Awesome is that sometimes pop ups from Chrome on one monitor would end up on another. I also had trouble switching focus between dual monitors. As a result, I would need to use my mouse. i3 multi-monitor support is more seamless compared to Awesome.
shrikant 13y ago
On a vaguely related note, Benedict Cumberbatch appears to use DWM in The Fifth Estate: http://i.imgur.com/1Ytwr5t.png http://i.imgur.com/1Ytwr5t.png
Shish2k 13y ago
After thinking about WMs for a while, I ended up realising that basically what I want is Eclipse ( http://shimmie.shishnet.org/v2/post/view/3171 http://shimmie.shishnet.org/v2/post/view/3171 ) -- specifically, a tiled WM with arbitrary nesting of "vertical split", "horizontal split" and "tabbed" containers, and mouse support for re-arranging the windows. i3 comes so very, very close; but no mouse support :( (I know keyboards are better for most things, but they aren't better for all things; I'd like to be able to use both as appropriate) Come to think of it, tmux uses that model too, with quite a lot of popularity, so it's not like it's a completely unknown style... Anyone know of any X WMs that do it though? Bonus points for having independent desktops for each monitor, and also for keeping up with modern standards (compositing, that dbus-based systray protocol that I forget the name of, etc)
- replax 13y ago
  Hi! i think awesome wm, yes that's the name (and it also is awesome) comes close to your needs. actually, i can't believe that they did not test it. it's really popular in arch linux circles. :)
  - 2ManyDogs 13y ago
    I did mention awesome, but it's so configurable I couldn't do it justice in a day (plus I don't really like it, partly because it's so configurable -- I prefer minimal WMs that stay out of my way). On-topic, wmfs2 also has mouse-moveable splits and tabbed containers, and herbstluftwm has both manual tiling and automatic tiling modes. There are many WMs out there that might meet your requirements -- try a few!
myle 13y ago
No one mentioned qtile. It is written in Python, tiling WM and very simple to use.
hmsimha 13y ago
dwm needs their documentation fixed. Not all of the keybindings are documented on the suckless webpage, and this has undoubtedly prevented many (including the author of this article) from realizing how easy it is to jump in without having to mod it. Alt+I and Alt+D increment and decrement the number of windows in the master area, on the left by default. Alt+L and Alt+H increase and decrease the width of the master area respectively. Alt+J and Alt+K move focus to new windows. And alt+enter switches the position of a focused window with an unfocused one. It's incredibly easy and fun to be able to do all your window management from the keyboard, and dwm will run much more responsively on slightly older computers.
lcedp 13y ago
One day per manager is nearly not enough for some managers to grok. Personally I recommend going with i3 - it's easier then average tiled WM to configure, but still some time should be spent to choose behavior options and compose your ultimate statusbar.

116 points by randallsquared 13y ago

pjmlp 13y ago

On my first GNU/Linux distribution I could only choose between twm, fwvm and OpenLook, boy am I old!

Zardoz84 13y ago
In my case, was twm, fwvm, fwvm95, kde , gnome 1.0 ... was SuSE 6.12 in the 1998's
- pjmlp 13y ago
  Slackware 2.0 in 1995.
2ManyDogs 13y ago
twm actually works quite well if you configure it to suit your needs.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  Well, when I saw twm for the first time, I already knew RiscOS, Atari ST GEM, Amiga Workbench, OS/2 PM, Desqview, Geoworks, Windows 3.x, Mac OS. So I wasn't that much impressed.

guylhem 13y ago

Glad to see some people are still using AfterStep. We put a lot of work into that - it was running just fine on my Toshiba 110CS, the main devel computer I used back in 2001 (and it was dated even back then - http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/8728/Toshiba-Satellite-110CS-810/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/8728/Toshiba-Satellit...) It was really fast and optimized back then. It should be blazing fast on modern hardware. EDIT - the review on http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=310500#p310500 http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=310500#p31050... mentions a slow start. Weird. It was globally as fast as fvwm and fvwm2, unless one started too many modules. I remember because I used them as benchmarks.

pjmlp 13y ago
It was my window manager around 1997-99.
agumonkey 13y ago
100MHz Pentium, what a nice constraint to work with.
- chrissmeuk 13y ago
  A 100Mhz Pentium is a pretty fast machine believe it or not. I survived for a couple of years in the early 00's on a 133Mhz machine I found in a skip and chucked FreeBSD on it. I reckon I could get some mileage out of one even today.
- endgame 13y ago
  Why is chrissmeuk's reply to you [dead], I wonder?
  - agumonkey 13y ago
    I don't know HN enough to guess, I was surprised too since it's dead but not removed so it asks for replies but (at least) I can't do that. I upvoted it in case it just needed to be in the positive, with no visible effect. Maybe he trolled on another thread and was punished ... anyway @chrissmeuk I understand pentium 100 are nice little cpus, I used a p2 350 for a loooong time, and I miss it a great deal since it was a real workhorse. And to clarify my first comment, I wish more people were programming on old machines, it's a good thing to avoid bloat.
    - guylhem 13y ago
      Indeed, working on a slow machine is the best thing one can do to produce optimized code. At the moment I'm using a macbookair3.1 with 4 gigs of ram- and it might even be too fast IMHO to add good constaints.
      - 13y ago

arocks 13y ago

In case you are wondering too, the author finally chose musca as his default WM: http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=206350#p206350 http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=206350#p20635...

AmrMostafa 13y ago
According to this[1], musca development halted since 2009. 1. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Musca https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Musca
- swdunlop 13y ago
  That is not a bad thing in a window manager for people wanting an environment with few surprises. Openbox's development has been idle for years, but it where I go every time after I get bored with fighting GNOME3 or E17 on a new Linux install.
  - 2ManyDogs 13y ago
    Exactly. People like to point out that older window managers aren't in active development, as if this was a bad thing. To me it just means the WM is stable and doesn't need bug fixes.
    - kbenson 13y ago
      I've been migrating my Fvwm2 config (with alterations) for over a decade now. Whenever I see a new feature that's actually useful and not window dressing (ha), I generally spend a few hours to try to implement it, or my take on it. Generally, this works best when you combine it's scripting with external utilities. In this respect, it's the bash of window managers. Surprisingly, I've actually had people be genuinely surprised as some of the simpler things, such as binding the mail key on the dell keyboard I was using to slide toggle Thunderbird in and out of view (move from off-screen on right to 90% of current screen), regardless of which desktop I'm on.

rsync 13y ago

ion3, ftw, after all these years.

codemac 13y ago
Has anyone kept up with notion development?
- dima55 13y ago
  I use notion, and will be for the foreseeable future. I suspect the article skipped it because it's in nonfree on Debian. This is due to Tuomo's funny licensing, and I don't think putting it there is fully justified, TBH. As for the development, there have been various bug fixes and some minor feature updates. It was and still is a fantastic WM
  - mcginleyr1 13y ago
    Wow I thought I was the only person still loving ion3 and notion. Notion has a few nice updates. Needs much more love.
    - mateuszf 13y ago
      Count one more - I also use it all the time when working under Linux. Haven't found anything close to it.
- bnegreve 13y ago
  Nothing much [1] but it works fine. I use it everyday. [1] http://notion.sourceforge.net/#changes http://notion.sourceforge.net/#changes
dnr 13y ago
Yup, I've used ion2 → ion3 → notion pretty much exclusively for 10 or 11 years now. I don't think I could switch to another wm for my main interface if I wanted to. But why would I want to? Gimp was the only slightly-annoying thing, and now that has a single-window mode. I have only one feature request that I haven't figured out how to do myself: I want to hide the status bar (mod_statusbar) on certain workspaces (the ones that have a full-screen browser). Anyone have any ideas?

jensenbox 13y ago

These guys have been under a DDoS for days now. I have tried to get them to flip over to Cloudflare but no response. Even now, their forum is getting a HNDoS.

D9u 13y ago
The site loads for me...
- jensenbox 13y ago
  I should have been more specific... Their repo is under DDoS http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=339366#p339366 http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=339366#p33936...
  - 2ManyDogs 13y ago
    There have been several responses to your requests to move to cloudflare. You have ignored them.

kunai 13y ago

Awww... no WindowMaker. This is one of the things that made me switch back to Linux from OS X. Inspired by this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6270254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6270254 I started running #! on a Tecra M2, and I now switch between the standard OpenBox config and dwm pretty constantly. The sheer feeling of freedom that you get from not being limited by a proprietary system where configuration is discouraged is one of the best parts of Linux and free software. In all honesty though, dwm, awesome, and i3 are probably my favorite picks for minimalism. There's just nothing that comes close to a hybrid/tiling WM in terms of efficiency. It's like vim. You don't ever realize how awful using the arrow keys and Ctrl-whatever was until you've tried HJKL and the massive amount of keybindings in vim, along with the endless configurability of your .vimrc. Floating WMs are convenient, but tiling WMs are just quality. On a 1024x768 screen, they save so much space that you never thought you needed.

pjmlp 13y ago
WindowMaker was quite nice, specially the docklets. It replaced AfterStep for me (around 1999) and I used it mainly until 2004. Nowadays I just use whatever is the default in any OS I use, as I no longer have the patient to tinker with settings.
- kunai 13y ago
  Gnome 3 is turning out to be the best DE on any platform. It's by far the most polished and innovative I've seen. I never thought I'd say that 3 years ago.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  WindowMaker was quite nice Hey! It's not dead yet! (Entered from my WindowMaker desktop). Development's even restarted in the past year or so, after being on hiatus (other than bug support) since ~2005.

Touche 13y ago

Every time I use a tiling WM I think to myself "This would be incredible if I only used terminals and minimalist X apps (like xclock)". But the problem is web browsers feel extremely out of place in a tiling WM and I need web browsers so...

tikhonj 13y ago
Why do web browsers feel out of place? When I'm using a web browser, it's almost always either taking up a whole screen or exactly half of one--it may as well be tiled already! So when I switched to XMonad, using browsers still felt very natural. Perhaps it's just a cosmetic issue? For example, if you're using Chrome, you have to configure it to use system borders--otherwise it just looks wrong. I also set my Firefox up to be much more minimalistic, which looks much better with a tiling WM.
- pbogdan 13y ago
  Could you share any details about your setup?
  - tikhonj 13y ago
    I didn't really do much customization. For FireFox, I just used a different theme and got rid of all the UI bits I didn't use. For Chrome, I only set it to use system borders. I didn't even configure XMonad very much--the defaults are very well thought out. In practice, it looks like this: Firefox: http://jelv.is/xmonad-ff.png http://jelv.is/xmonad-ff.png Chrome: http://jelv.is/xmonad-chrome.png http://jelv.is/xmonad-chrome.png Tiled: http://jelv.is/xmonad-tiled.png http://jelv.is/xmonad-tiled.png The only real problem I've had is that form widgets are rather ugly. I think this should be easy enough to change, I just haven't gotten around to it yet.
- ics 13y ago
  Completely agree– I absolutely love having my browser tiled. Every time I look up and realize I'm still in OS X and can't split my browser window something twitches and I contemplate booting up a VM so it doesn't happen again while I'm in the zone. I'd also be interested in seeing what modifications you've made though– I don't think I configured very much and even though I don't use Chrom(ium) as my primary browser I never really took issue with the way it looked. In Firefox I just hide everything and use Pentadactyl.

D9u 13y ago

I noticed a couple of my favorites. Pekwm, and dwm. I wish that someone had done this list a few years ago, as the http://xwinman.org/ http://xwinman.org/ site is all I had to go on when I did my own WM search.

2ManyDogs 13y ago
Thank you. Someone who isn't complaining that I didn't feature their favorite WM. :)

mkhattab 13y ago

Great list, although like most tools the full experience comes after spending a great deal of time tinkering with it. Two of my favorites on that list are awm (Awesome) and i3. I started with awm after using the mess that is Unity (Ubuntu) then switched to OSX. Then I started missing tiling window managers, so I started using spectacle, which is great. Recently my SSD failed on my MBA so I switched to Ubuntu and to the even greater mess than before, Unity. Apparently one needs SLI/Crossfire to get acceptable performance in Unity. So, I switched back awm which is still great but shit when it comes to multi-monitor support out of the box. Finally switched to i3. Moral of the story is one should use what works best for him/her as long as it's not Unity.

gizmo686 13y ago
I use Awesome with multiple monitors and have never noticed any difficulty. What does i3 do differently?
- mkhattab 13y ago
  i3 will use different workspaces for each monitor. So if you have dual monitors by default, the primary monitor will be workspace 1 and the secondary will be workspace 2. Workspaces are created and destroyed as needed, that is they're existing only when windows are attached. One problem I had with Awesome is that sometimes pop ups from Chrome on one monitor would end up on another. I also had trouble switching focus between dual monitors. As a result, I would need to use my mouse. i3 multi-monitor support is more seamless compared to Awesome.

shrikant 13y ago

On a vaguely related note, Benedict Cumberbatch appears to use DWM in The Fifth Estate: http://i.imgur.com/1Ytwr5t.png http://i.imgur.com/1Ytwr5t.png

Shish2k 13y ago

After thinking about WMs for a while, I ended up realising that basically what I want is Eclipse ( http://shimmie.shishnet.org/v2/post/view/3171 http://shimmie.shishnet.org/v2/post/view/3171 ) -- specifically, a tiled WM with arbitrary nesting of "vertical split", "horizontal split" and "tabbed" containers, and mouse support for re-arranging the windows. i3 comes so very, very close; but no mouse support :( (I know keyboards are better for most things, but they aren't better for all things; I'd like to be able to use both as appropriate) Come to think of it, tmux uses that model too, with quite a lot of popularity, so it's not like it's a completely unknown style... Anyone know of any X WMs that do it though? Bonus points for having independent desktops for each monitor, and also for keeping up with modern standards (compositing, that dbus-based systray protocol that I forget the name of, etc)

replax 13y ago
Hi! i think awesome wm, yes that's the name (and it also is awesome) comes close to your needs. actually, i can't believe that they did not test it. it's really popular in arch linux circles. :)
- 2ManyDogs 13y ago
  I did mention awesome, but it's so configurable I couldn't do it justice in a day (plus I don't really like it, partly because it's so configurable -- I prefer minimal WMs that stay out of my way). On-topic, wmfs2 also has mouse-moveable splits and tabbed containers, and herbstluftwm has both manual tiling and automatic tiling modes. There are many WMs out there that might meet your requirements -- try a few!

myle 13y ago

No one mentioned qtile. It is written in Python, tiling WM and very simple to use.

hmsimha 13y ago

dwm needs their documentation fixed. Not all of the keybindings are documented on the suckless webpage, and this has undoubtedly prevented many (including the author of this article) from realizing how easy it is to jump in without having to mod it. Alt+I and Alt+D increment and decrement the number of windows in the master area, on the left by default. Alt+L and Alt+H increase and decrease the width of the master area respectively. Alt+J and Alt+K move focus to new windows. And alt+enter switches the position of a focused window with an unfocused one. It's incredibly easy and fun to be able to do all your window management from the keyboard, and dwm will run much more responsively on slightly older computers.

lcedp 13y ago

One day per manager is nearly not enough for some managers to grok. Personally I recommend going with i3 - it's easier then average tiled WM to configure, but still some time should be spent to choose behavior options and compose your ultimate statusbar.