6 ms·

I really, really, really want to move to using a tiling window manager. Watching YouTube videos of people using them well, you can't help but think "Damn, they'

by ecaron 12y ago

I really, really, really want to move to using a tiling window manager. Watching YouTube videos of people using them well, you can't help but think "Damn, they're really crazy efficient". But I can't find one that has good enough documentation that I can learn it on my own (and since nobody else at my office uses it, somebody has got to be first.) I'd love to get into http://i3wm.org/ http://i3wm.org/ but can't find anything to push me over the ledge, so I keep resigning myself to checking out projects like the one in OP and thinking "Wouldn't that be nice..."

Sir_Cmpwn 12y ago
I use i3 and I love it. You can steal from my config if you like: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/dotfiles/blob/master/i3/config https://github.com/SirCmpwn/dotfiles/blob/master/i3/config
langseth 12y ago
I use awesomeWM, http://awesome.naquadah.org/ http://awesome.naquadah.org/, we have about 10 converts in our office now. It seems to be fairly well documented and has plenty of addons to make it look better (although I use just the bare minimum). I just wish I could find a decent tilinging manager for OS X (divvy and amethyst do not fit my requirements)
- auxym 12y ago
  I tried awesome, and was somewhat disapointed by a community that felt 'dead'. Searching google for answers to questions I had often yielded old, out-of-date answers not relevant to the current version. I did however appreciate the ease of configuring it with Lua. If I feel like trying a tiling wm again, I think I'd go with xmonad. From reading, it seems to have decent defaults, and it'd a good opportunity to start playing with Haskell. I wish integrating tiling wm's with regular DE's, even lightweight ones (lxde, xfce) would be more popular. When switching all out to awesome, I missed the conveniences like a tray with wifi and sound volume. I just want a DE, with tiling windows!
  - S4M 12y ago
    There [0], how to use xMonad with xfce, I followed the instructions and it worked fine. I didn't have any problem to roll back either. https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_XFCE https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_X...
  - Symmetry 12y ago
    If you're running Ubuntu then if you apt-get install xmonad gnome-panel a GNOME with Xmonad option will appear in your login screen. Then you have to create an xmonad configuration that works with GNOME like so import XMonad import XMonad.Config.Gnome main = do xmonad $ gnomeConfig in .xmonad/xmonad.hs and everything will work.
    - rkrzr 12y ago
      Mind = blown. That's awesome, I'll have to give this a try. I used to run XMonad on Arch, but then I switched to Ubuntu a couple of years back and got with the Unity program. But if I can have the best of both worlds, I'm sold. The icing on the cake would be if a drop-down terminal like Tilda still works with this hybrid setup as well.
  - th0br0 12y ago
    I've been using xmonad for ... well, guess it's been the past 3 years now. Never had to change the config or adapt to API changes as I had with LUA and things just work. Plus, it's quite performant (although it has some input-looping related quirks sometimes) and hardly takes up any memory. Can only recommend it to people new to the tiling wm scene.
  - chriswarbo 12y ago
    I used Enlightenment 16 in Gnome 2 for years, but Gnome 3 seems to take more of an everything-or-nothing approach. These days I'm using Xmonad standalone, plus Xmobar as a kind of pipe-driven, text-only notification area. If I ever need a system tray, I run trayer (and curse whoever designed the program that requires it!).
- estebank 12y ago
  Try spectacle. It's pretty simple and straightforward. You cannot do advanced layouts, but splitting the screen in halfs both vertically and horizontally with the keyboard makes Mac OS X much more bearable.
- ianyh 12y ago
  What about Amethyst didn't fit your requirements? I know it's still buggy, I'm just curious if there's any specific ones or if it's just generally not useful to you.
- bombtrack 12y ago
  I tried several for OS X and landed on using Moom [0]. The layout snapshots is really handy to jumpstart the day and put everything in place. Keyboard shortcuts allow resizing and moving windows around. It's highly configurable, so you can add or remove features as you see fit. I'd give the free trial a spin. [0] http://manytricks.com/moom/ http://manytricks.com/moom/
darklajid 12y ago
I'm running i3wm. I wouldn't consider myself an expert and found the change (I'm otherwise a Gnome kind of guy) easy enough. Is there anything specific you have trouble with?
fla 12y ago
I was in a similar situation and ended happy with bspwm beacause it's very minimal and simple to figure out.
spain 12y ago
i3 is pretty easy to learn and configure I'd say having dabbled with most of the popular window managers bar Xmonad. Nowadays I just use the Xfce window manager.
Yen 12y ago
I'm a fan of i3wm. It has fairly good documentation (I learned it on my own, primarily from the documentation), and a relatively active irc channel. The nicest things about a tiling manager? You can control nearly everything from the keyboard. It's very quick and easy to set up side-by-side windows (or side/top-bottom, and so on), and resizing one automatically resizes the other. It really helps on smaller screens, since by default everything is full screen with minimal window decoration. Some nice features of i3wm in particular - well developed manual control, most layouts can be expressed as the composition of simpler layouts, and the config file is just a config file, not a full fledged program. Also, it's worth remembering that on Linux you can have multiple WMs installed at the same time. You can log in to i3wm, and if there's something you really can't figure out, you can log out and switch to gnome/kde/etc. I don't know if there's a way to switch WMs without shutting down the whole x session though. Would be interested to know if it's possible.
- DSMan195276 12y ago
  > I don't know if there's a way to switch WMs without shutting down the whole x session though. Would be interested to know if it's possible. Some WM's support the '--replace' flag (Both the WM being replaced and the one you're starting have to support it). If you run a new WM with the '--replace' flag, the old WM will shutdown and the new WM will take-over all the windows it was handling. This is only switching WM's though, so you can't really switch into Gnome or KDE doing this and then switch-out. i3 doesn't support it though (It would have a bit of a hard time supporting it anyway), so you can't do it with i3. If you can't do it that way though, then just have your X session start a terminal on screen instead of a WM. The X session will stay live as long as that terminal stays open, so you can start and kill any number of WM's as you want as long as your other programs don't mind it. Not everything shuts down very cleanly though, so you might not be able to start and close Gnome and then start KDE in the same session. You should be able to kill i3 and start openbox or xfwm though, for example.
- Shish2k 12y ago
  > You can control nearly everything from the keyboard Personally I'm still waiting for a tiling WM with mouse support - having used a few keyboard based WMs, and having used Eclipse, I find Eclipse to be by far the nicest. The only problem being that it's an application panel manager, not an X windows manager :( The features I want from a WM: http://shimmie.shishnet.org/v2/_images/ae13a6ed6a5d725f34d10cf386a5901f/3171%20-%20eclipse%20screenshot.png http://shimmie.shishnet.org/v2/_images/ae13a6ed6a5d725f34d10...
robertfw 12y ago
I use I3 and highly recommend it. I used to use Awesome - i3 has felt much easier to work with and configure. The docs are pretty good. I can't go back to a non-tiling manager now!
S4M 12y ago
I used to use xmonad, but ditched it because it wasn't working well with Android Studio. I read somewhere that other tiling window managers have problems to display Android Studio under some video drivers. Now I'm back to the default window manager of xfce4, which is ok since I tend to use only emacs and a browser, so I have have one workspace for each.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- foobarqux 12y ago
  There is a problem with tiling window managers and Java GUIs. The fix is to export an environment variable whose name you can find on the XMonad faq.
  - S4M 12y ago
    Thanks for the tip! I gonna give xMonad another chance!
    - chriswarbo 12y ago
      There's a program called "wmname" specifically designed for this: http://tools.suckless.org/wmname http://tools.suckless.org/wmname Just run "wmname LG3D" then restart any open Java programs. LG3D is "Looking Glass 3D", a Java window manager http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass . It's quite amusing that Java's UI toolkit contains special-cases to avoid breaking their demos.
vidarh 12y ago
It took me an evening to get fully switched to i3wm. It's simple, and fast, and easy to understand and configure.
kornakiewicz 12y ago
I use i3 since about two months. I got same issues like you and here's my advice: install i3 and try to use it, after 2-3 days you'll be able to move windows, switch them or run apps with only keyboard (keybindings are pretty intuitive, but you need to try). Don't try to use it for every task or force yourself to use only it - I hate it when have to deal with some windows apps in wine, which are opening alerts and windows like shit, and then simply switch to gnome or sth. Don't try to customize everything at once, but rather slowly find your real needs and google around how to make your system your best tool.
mhd 12y ago
I've been using them on and off, and the first thing I'd like to mention is that they're in no way magical -- both when it comes to using them (which is mostly knowing a few shortcuts and internalizing the layout system), but also in regard to how much they help you. Sure, they certainly do look snazzy, especially when coupled with the movie hacker-approved unified dark color scheme. New windows pop up and quickly assume their rightful space and everything just looks so darn tidy. But for certain usage patterns, that doesn't get you a lot. Even if you're popping up disposable shell windows left and right, you might also do that within screen/tmux, where the window manager doesn't come into play at all (or have some drop-down quake-like console). Also, your running applications and especially their different configurations might not change that often, in which case you're really saving yourself some manual layout fiddling once. So a lot of people would perform pretty much the same with just alt-tab window cycling and virtual desktops (which seem orthogonal to the whole deal). I mean, if you look at the vast majority of screenshots, you don't even see that much work. The obligatory IRC client, fake-GUI music players and/or file managers and probably an editor with the configuration file or some minor coursework open. It's not exactly Scotty and his Mac Plus. Having said that, I'd add my vote to i3wm, as it isn't as ideologically pure as some others (you still have window titles if you want them, and the layout remains somewhat manual). Plus a rather readable configuration format, even if the default configuration is seemingly intended to drive vi-users mad. My alternative would be bspwm, the binary space partitioning wm. A lot more minimal, but the automatic layout algorithm is rather tractable and one certainly wouldn't be confused with too many options.
- jff 12y ago
  > I mean, if you look at the vast majority of screenshots, you don't even see that much work. The obligatory IRC client, fake-GUI music players and/or file managers and probably an editor with the configuration file or some minor coursework open. It's not exactly Scotty and his Mac Plus. Well, this applies to all WM screenshots ever, not just tiling window managers. The main problem with WM screenshots is that you want to show how it looks, show off some features, but my actual work is generally spread across many virtual desktops, each with just a few windows (mostly xterm)
  - 12y ago
shmulkey18 12y ago
Same here, but I prefer a WM that supports (for want of a better term) "packing" 80 column wide Xterms and Emacs windows into the screen and doing static placement of things like Pidgin. The tiling WMs I've briefly looked at all seem to re-size windows to fill the available screen real estate; I'm old school and want my Xterms and Emacs windows to be 80 chars wide. Are there any tiling WMs which support this layout style or can be easily configured to do so?
jff 12y ago
I use StumpWM, but it can be a real pain in the ass to get running and configured. I like that it has static layouts: you manually split the screen into panes and windows go in those panes, rather than everything resizing & shuffling whenever you open a terminal. I also really like the keybindings, which are by default all preceded by C-t, so you'd hit "C-t c" to open a new terminal--this avoids the whole "window manager ate all my alt-key combinations" problem you'll run into with i3 and a lot of other WMs. The problem is that it's Common Lisp, so the binary is huge and it takes a long time to start up, and sometimes it crashes in interesting ways. But on the other hand, it's Common Lisp, so you can connect to it from Emacs and play with the code... at least until you crash it. I'm thinking about trying the new Guile window manager that popped up here a few days back, it looks like it has a StumpWM-esque style and maybe Guile is a little more light-weight/less flaky than most Common Lisp implementations.
- spain 12y ago
  > I'm thinking about trying the new Guile window manager that popped up here a few days back, it looks like it has a StumpWM-esque style and maybe Guile is a little more light-weight/less flaky than most Common Lisp implementations. Thanks for bringing this to my attention! I'm a StumpWM fan too and it looks like Guile-WM has promise. Here's the homepage for anyone else interested: http://www.markwitmer.com/guile-xcb/guile-wm.html http://www.markwitmer.com/guile-xcb/guile-wm.html
  - jff 12y ago
    I was just about to switch over to Guile-WM on my desktop today, but it doesn't look like it has virtual desktop support, which kind of kills it for me for the time being. Otherwise it ticks pretty much all the right boxes.
    - photex 12y ago
      Virtual desktops are so amazingly useful that it's hard to imagine why a tiling WM wouldn't adopt them.
jqm 12y ago
I like i3 quite a bit. It was easy to pick up and a huge improvement over KDE for what I do. Especially on the laptop. The 3 second X startup is nice too. It did take a little work to get it set up and comfortable.
johnmaguire2013 12y ago
Do i3. It's one of the easiest to learn and the only way I was able to get into tiling window managers. I outgrew it when I got a 4K TV as it wasn't able to handle it well, but as others have said, it's "less pure" of a window manager. It's extremely dynamic, easy to move things around, and easy to resize. If you've used vim before it'll be even easier.
lewaldman 12y ago
Mate... I will tell you that the one that I find have the easier learning curve is AwesomeWM. The main advantage of it tho, is not the tiling window managing facilities... But the run-or-raise plugin. It allows you to run (start) or raise (go to the window) of any application with an assigned shortcut. Mine are: Mod+e - Emacs Mod+u - Browser (Conkeror) Mod+y - Browser (Chromium) Mod+k - Konsole Mod+. - Keepass Mod+x - Pidgin chat window Mod+i - Skype chat window The choice of shortcuts may seen arbitrary, but I'm a Dvorak user and all the keys are easily accessible. With this setup, from my editor I'm a Mod+u / Ctrl+g g to a search on google, and from there I'm a Mod+k from my terminal (from where I run tmux... ;P) and a Mod+e from Emacs. I'm also using a dropdown terminal with another tmux where I have access, from any where on my system just pressing F1, to my MTA (mutt), file manager (mc), IRC (irssi), Music player (cmus) and a root shell. Honestly... With this setup there is definetly no going back... Every thing on the tips of my fingers... Some shortcut away. I almost feel part of the machine! :)

by ecaron 12y ago

Sir_Cmpwn 12y ago

I use i3 and I love it. You can steal from my config if you like: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/dotfiles/blob/master/i3/config https://github.com/SirCmpwn/dotfiles/blob/master/i3/config

langseth 12y ago

I use awesomeWM, http://awesome.naquadah.org/ http://awesome.naquadah.org/, we have about 10 converts in our office now. It seems to be fairly well documented and has plenty of addons to make it look better (although I use just the bare minimum). I just wish I could find a decent tilinging manager for OS X (divvy and amethyst do not fit my requirements)

auxym 12y ago
I tried awesome, and was somewhat disapointed by a community that felt 'dead'. Searching google for answers to questions I had often yielded old, out-of-date answers not relevant to the current version. I did however appreciate the ease of configuring it with Lua. If I feel like trying a tiling wm again, I think I'd go with xmonad. From reading, it seems to have decent defaults, and it'd a good opportunity to start playing with Haskell. I wish integrating tiling wm's with regular DE's, even lightweight ones (lxde, xfce) would be more popular. When switching all out to awesome, I missed the conveniences like a tray with wifi and sound volume. I just want a DE, with tiling windows!
- S4M 12y ago
  There [0], how to use xMonad with xfce, I followed the instructions and it worked fine. I didn't have any problem to roll back either. https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_XFCE https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_X...
- Symmetry 12y ago
  If you're running Ubuntu then if you apt-get install xmonad gnome-panel a GNOME with Xmonad option will appear in your login screen. Then you have to create an xmonad configuration that works with GNOME like so import XMonad import XMonad.Config.Gnome main = do xmonad $ gnomeConfig in .xmonad/xmonad.hs and everything will work.
  - rkrzr 12y ago
    Mind = blown. That's awesome, I'll have to give this a try. I used to run XMonad on Arch, but then I switched to Ubuntu a couple of years back and got with the Unity program. But if I can have the best of both worlds, I'm sold. The icing on the cake would be if a drop-down terminal like Tilda still works with this hybrid setup as well.
- th0br0 12y ago
  I've been using xmonad for ... well, guess it's been the past 3 years now. Never had to change the config or adapt to API changes as I had with LUA and things just work. Plus, it's quite performant (although it has some input-looping related quirks sometimes) and hardly takes up any memory. Can only recommend it to people new to the tiling wm scene.
- chriswarbo 12y ago
  I used Enlightenment 16 in Gnome 2 for years, but Gnome 3 seems to take more of an everything-or-nothing approach. These days I'm using Xmonad standalone, plus Xmobar as a kind of pipe-driven, text-only notification area. If I ever need a system tray, I run trayer (and curse whoever designed the program that requires it!).
estebank 12y ago
Try spectacle. It's pretty simple and straightforward. You cannot do advanced layouts, but splitting the screen in halfs both vertically and horizontally with the keyboard makes Mac OS X much more bearable.
ianyh 12y ago
What about Amethyst didn't fit your requirements? I know it's still buggy, I'm just curious if there's any specific ones or if it's just generally not useful to you.
bombtrack 12y ago
I tried several for OS X and landed on using Moom [0]. The layout snapshots is really handy to jumpstart the day and put everything in place. Keyboard shortcuts allow resizing and moving windows around. It's highly configurable, so you can add or remove features as you see fit. I'd give the free trial a spin. [0] http://manytricks.com/moom/ http://manytricks.com/moom/

darklajid 12y ago

I'm running i3wm. I wouldn't consider myself an expert and found the change (I'm otherwise a Gnome kind of guy) easy enough. Is there anything specific you have trouble with?

fla 12y ago

I was in a similar situation and ended happy with bspwm beacause it's very minimal and simple to figure out.

spain 12y ago

i3 is pretty easy to learn and configure I'd say having dabbled with most of the popular window managers bar Xmonad. Nowadays I just use the Xfce window manager.

Yen 12y ago

I'm a fan of i3wm. It has fairly good documentation (I learned it on my own, primarily from the documentation), and a relatively active irc channel. The nicest things about a tiling manager? You can control nearly everything from the keyboard. It's very quick and easy to set up side-by-side windows (or side/top-bottom, and so on), and resizing one automatically resizes the other. It really helps on smaller screens, since by default everything is full screen with minimal window decoration. Some nice features of i3wm in particular - well developed manual control, most layouts can be expressed as the composition of simpler layouts, and the config file is just a config file, not a full fledged program. Also, it's worth remembering that on Linux you can have multiple WMs installed at the same time. You can log in to i3wm, and if there's something you really can't figure out, you can log out and switch to gnome/kde/etc. I don't know if there's a way to switch WMs without shutting down the whole x session though. Would be interested to know if it's possible.

DSMan195276 12y ago
> I don't know if there's a way to switch WMs without shutting down the whole x session though. Would be interested to know if it's possible. Some WM's support the '--replace' flag (Both the WM being replaced and the one you're starting have to support it). If you run a new WM with the '--replace' flag, the old WM will shutdown and the new WM will take-over all the windows it was handling. This is only switching WM's though, so you can't really switch into Gnome or KDE doing this and then switch-out. i3 doesn't support it though (It would have a bit of a hard time supporting it anyway), so you can't do it with i3. If you can't do it that way though, then just have your X session start a terminal on screen instead of a WM. The X session will stay live as long as that terminal stays open, so you can start and kill any number of WM's as you want as long as your other programs don't mind it. Not everything shuts down very cleanly though, so you might not be able to start and close Gnome and then start KDE in the same session. You should be able to kill i3 and start openbox or xfwm though, for example.
Shish2k 12y ago
> You can control nearly everything from the keyboard Personally I'm still waiting for a tiling WM with mouse support - having used a few keyboard based WMs, and having used Eclipse, I find Eclipse to be by far the nicest. The only problem being that it's an application panel manager, not an X windows manager :( The features I want from a WM: http://shimmie.shishnet.org/v2/_images/ae13a6ed6a5d725f34d10cf386a5901f/3171%20-%20eclipse%20screenshot.png http://shimmie.shishnet.org/v2/_images/ae13a6ed6a5d725f34d10...

robertfw 12y ago

I use I3 and highly recommend it. I used to use Awesome - i3 has felt much easier to work with and configure. The docs are pretty good. I can't go back to a non-tiling manager now!

S4M 12y ago

I used to use xmonad, but ditched it because it wasn't working well with Android Studio. I read somewhere that other tiling window managers have problems to display Android Studio under some video drivers. Now I'm back to the default window manager of xfce4, which is ok since I tend to use only emacs and a browser, so I have have one workspace for each.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
foobarqux 12y ago
There is a problem with tiling window managers and Java GUIs. The fix is to export an environment variable whose name you can find on the XMonad faq.
- S4M 12y ago
  Thanks for the tip! I gonna give xMonad another chance!
  - chriswarbo 12y ago
    There's a program called "wmname" specifically designed for this: http://tools.suckless.org/wmname http://tools.suckless.org/wmname Just run "wmname LG3D" then restart any open Java programs. LG3D is "Looking Glass 3D", a Java window manager http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass . It's quite amusing that Java's UI toolkit contains special-cases to avoid breaking their demos.

vidarh 12y ago

It took me an evening to get fully switched to i3wm. It's simple, and fast, and easy to understand and configure.

kornakiewicz 12y ago

I use i3 since about two months. I got same issues like you and here's my advice: install i3 and try to use it, after 2-3 days you'll be able to move windows, switch them or run apps with only keyboard (keybindings are pretty intuitive, but you need to try). Don't try to use it for every task or force yourself to use only it - I hate it when have to deal with some windows apps in wine, which are opening alerts and windows like shit, and then simply switch to gnome or sth. Don't try to customize everything at once, but rather slowly find your real needs and google around how to make your system your best tool.

mhd 12y ago

I've been using them on and off, and the first thing I'd like to mention is that they're in no way magical -- both when it comes to using them (which is mostly knowing a few shortcuts and internalizing the layout system), but also in regard to how much they help you. Sure, they certainly do look snazzy, especially when coupled with the movie hacker-approved unified dark color scheme. New windows pop up and quickly assume their rightful space and everything just looks so darn tidy. But for certain usage patterns, that doesn't get you a lot. Even if you're popping up disposable shell windows left and right, you might also do that within screen/tmux, where the window manager doesn't come into play at all (or have some drop-down quake-like console). Also, your running applications and especially their different configurations might not change that often, in which case you're really saving yourself some manual layout fiddling once. So a lot of people would perform pretty much the same with just alt-tab window cycling and virtual desktops (which seem orthogonal to the whole deal). I mean, if you look at the vast majority of screenshots, you don't even see that much work. The obligatory IRC client, fake-GUI music players and/or file managers and probably an editor with the configuration file or some minor coursework open. It's not exactly Scotty and his Mac Plus. Having said that, I'd add my vote to i3wm, as it isn't as ideologically pure as some others (you still have window titles if you want them, and the layout remains somewhat manual). Plus a rather readable configuration format, even if the default configuration is seemingly intended to drive vi-users mad. My alternative would be bspwm, the binary space partitioning wm. A lot more minimal, but the automatic layout algorithm is rather tractable and one certainly wouldn't be confused with too many options.

jff 12y ago
> I mean, if you look at the vast majority of screenshots, you don't even see that much work. The obligatory IRC client, fake-GUI music players and/or file managers and probably an editor with the configuration file or some minor coursework open. It's not exactly Scotty and his Mac Plus. Well, this applies to all WM screenshots ever, not just tiling window managers. The main problem with WM screenshots is that you want to show how it looks, show off some features, but my actual work is generally spread across many virtual desktops, each with just a few windows (mostly xterm)
- 12y ago

shmulkey18 12y ago

Same here, but I prefer a WM that supports (for want of a better term) "packing" 80 column wide Xterms and Emacs windows into the screen and doing static placement of things like Pidgin. The tiling WMs I've briefly looked at all seem to re-size windows to fill the available screen real estate; I'm old school and want my Xterms and Emacs windows to be 80 chars wide. Are there any tiling WMs which support this layout style or can be easily configured to do so?

jff 12y ago

I use StumpWM, but it can be a real pain in the ass to get running and configured. I like that it has static layouts: you manually split the screen into panes and windows go in those panes, rather than everything resizing & shuffling whenever you open a terminal. I also really like the keybindings, which are by default all preceded by C-t, so you'd hit "C-t c" to open a new terminal--this avoids the whole "window manager ate all my alt-key combinations" problem you'll run into with i3 and a lot of other WMs. The problem is that it's Common Lisp, so the binary is huge and it takes a long time to start up, and sometimes it crashes in interesting ways. But on the other hand, it's Common Lisp, so you can connect to it from Emacs and play with the code... at least until you crash it. I'm thinking about trying the new Guile window manager that popped up here a few days back, it looks like it has a StumpWM-esque style and maybe Guile is a little more light-weight/less flaky than most Common Lisp implementations.

spain 12y ago
> I'm thinking about trying the new Guile window manager that popped up here a few days back, it looks like it has a StumpWM-esque style and maybe Guile is a little more light-weight/less flaky than most Common Lisp implementations. Thanks for bringing this to my attention! I'm a StumpWM fan too and it looks like Guile-WM has promise. Here's the homepage for anyone else interested: http://www.markwitmer.com/guile-xcb/guile-wm.html http://www.markwitmer.com/guile-xcb/guile-wm.html
- jff 12y ago
  I was just about to switch over to Guile-WM on my desktop today, but it doesn't look like it has virtual desktop support, which kind of kills it for me for the time being. Otherwise it ticks pretty much all the right boxes.
  - photex 12y ago
    Virtual desktops are so amazingly useful that it's hard to imagine why a tiling WM wouldn't adopt them.

jqm 12y ago

I like i3 quite a bit. It was easy to pick up and a huge improvement over KDE for what I do. Especially on the laptop. The 3 second X startup is nice too. It did take a little work to get it set up and comfortable.

johnmaguire2013 12y ago

Do i3. It's one of the easiest to learn and the only way I was able to get into tiling window managers. I outgrew it when I got a 4K TV as it wasn't able to handle it well, but as others have said, it's "less pure" of a window manager. It's extremely dynamic, easy to move things around, and easy to resize. If you've used vim before it'll be even easier.

lewaldman 12y ago

Mate... I will tell you that the one that I find have the easier learning curve is AwesomeWM. The main advantage of it tho, is not the tiling window managing facilities... But the run-or-raise plugin. It allows you to run (start) or raise (go to the window) of any application with an assigned shortcut. Mine are: Mod+e - Emacs Mod+u - Browser (Conkeror) Mod+y - Browser (Chromium) Mod+k - Konsole Mod+. - Keepass Mod+x - Pidgin chat window Mod+i - Skype chat window The choice of shortcuts may seen arbitrary, but I'm a Dvorak user and all the keys are easily accessible. With this setup, from my editor I'm a Mod+u / Ctrl+g g to a search on google, and from there I'm a Mod+k from my terminal (from where I run tmux... ;P) and a Mod+e from Emacs. I'm also using a dropdown terminal with another tmux where I have access, from any where on my system just pressing F1, to my MTA (mutt), file manager (mc), IRC (irssi), Music player (cmus) and a root shell. Honestly... With this setup there is definetly no going back... Every thing on the tips of my fingers... Some shortcut away. I almost feel part of the machine! :)