What's the difference in the user experience of ion3, wmii and dwm.

Mandor · 2007-04-22 09:23:36

I want to try something new, especially some new concepts, not just another wm, nor I actually 'need' something - in the moment xfce just works for me. Of course, I have thoroughly read the (available) documentation of these WMs and tested a session, but they are all too different and I feel I need some shared experience in order to decide in which one to invest more time. I would like to ask people that have wider experience to spot some strong or weak points of each WM - but in no way it should be like 'this one is better' or sth. - especially ones that are not instantly obvious - from the descriptions on the home site or limited testing,
For example - wmii talk 9P, and this sound really cool, but I have no damn idea how this could be actually useful. Dwm is extremely minimalist, and I am not sure if it is not too minimalist to be practical.

Again, I don't need advice like what Wm to choose (which is essentially a stupid question), but just mentioning peculiar spots of each one, especially not instantly obvious ones.

Thank you in advance.

P.S. If there is already a topic, that is close to that, I'll appreciate provided link - my search found just general WM topics, as well as topics for specific WM, which was useful, but not completely enough.

P.P.S. If someone thinks ratpoison is unfairly ignored, one may provide its advantages, although I just somehow do not like it (nothing reasanoble)

beza1e1 · 2007-04-22 14:23:47

I had the same experience with wmii. No idea how to use 9P.

The concept of dwm is really cool for a 12" Laptop, but dwm is too minimalistic for me. No Unicode support and too much hassle in configuring. I also dislike the resizing of my terminals in dwm. Maybe a "composite version" of dwm to scale the windows, without changing the height and width for the application would help with that.

Personally i went back to Gnome after using wmii and dwm for some days.

tbroderick · 2007-04-22 19:34:15

beza1e1 wrote:

No Unicode support and too much hassle in configuring. I also dislike the resizing of my terminals in dwm. Maybe a "composite version" of dwm to scale the windows, without changing the height and width for the application would help with that.

What is wrong with Unicode in dwm? Seems to work fine for me.

pauldonnelly · 2007-04-22 19:47:40

The three (and I'll throw in Ratpoison because I love it) seem to have distinct approaches to the way you're expected to use windows.

DWM expects you to have one main window focused and a few others that you do want to see, but don't need to have focused at full size. The way it puts them along the edge is pretty nice on a widescreen monitor. Virtual desktops are provided since it would be a pain to cycle all the way through your window list whenever you wanted to change.

wmii seems (I only played with it a little) to be based largely on columns. This is very similar to Plan 9's editor Acme. Heck, when I first saw the screen shot on the wmii page I thought I was looking at Acme. You divide the screen into (usually two) columns and can arrange your windows within those as you choose. It's a fairly nice approach, marrying the simplicity of DWM's "main window" concept with the flexibility of other managers by having only a couple of "places" for windows (the columns), but multiple windows in each, whose exact positioning doesn't matter much. Tags are substituted for conventional workspaces. I haven't played with this feature.

Ion3 (which I used for a while) is based on the idea that you will divide the screen into just a couple of panes, and group your windows into those. Most of your windows will be invisible at any given time, but you can get to them all easily with the tab strip at the top of each pane, showing its associated windows. In this WM each window is in a definite place, unlike in Ratpoison, in which hidden windows are just hidden, and associated with no pane in particular. Ion also assumes that you will have some programs that don't play nice with a tiled manager, and allows the creation of virtual desktops that contain floating windows. Virtual desktops in this WM are pretty much the same as those in your standard floating WM.

The key to "getting" Ratpoison (which I have used a lot, and am using now) is that unlike the other three, you're not expected to have a complex layout of screen panes. Although you could create something of arbitrary complexity using the vertical and horizontal spit commands, it would quickly become a nightmare to work with, and there is no easy way to switch between layouts because, while you can save and load them, windows are not associated with particular panes on the screen, and will end up who-knows where. Instead, a Ratpoison user wants to switch between windows by hitting ^T (remappable, I use my Windows key) and then the number that was assigned when each window was created. As you may notice, this is how screen works as well. You quickly learn to remember these numbers, just like a screen user or Nethack player. 90% of the time I work with only one window on the screen switching between it and my alternate window, and the other 9% of the time I have two windows (mostly when I want to drag and drop things, but sometimes for reference material). 1% of the time I might hit three or [gasp!] four.

While the other three WMs seek to make it easier to manage your on screen windows, Ratpoison takes the approach that you probably don't need to have more than a couple of windows on screen at one time. Based on this logic, Ratpoison doesn't provide virtual desktops. If your windows aren't on screen, why do you need more virtual screens for them not to be on? Ratpoison does provide window groups, which serve a similar function. Unlike virtual desktops, switching groups does not change what's on your screen; it only changes the list of windows you are working with. This may sound like a pain, but keep in mind that you, as a Ratpoison user, probably have fewer than two panes on your screen. It's not hard to switch both of those to something else, and half the time you only want to change one of them (e.g. drag and drop between window groups). Ratpoison also supports multiple screens, which are treated much like panes on a single screen, except of course you can not delete them (senseless) or move windows between them (X11 limitation; not Ratpoison specific).

Another nice Ratpoison feature is that you can tell it not to manage certain windows, and you can tell it to leave some padding between windows and the edge of the screen. So I can run an unmanaged Rox sidebar to hold try icons, status monitors, a trash can, and volume control, and reserve that space for it with some padding. I can also remove that padding or change its size if I want to cover the sidebar.

Last edited by pauldonnelly (2007-04-22 19:52:16)

dk · 2007-04-22 20:19:38

I've been switching back and forth between ratpoison, ion3 and dwm for a longtime now. Peculiar is a good word since
any of the things I may mention, I wouldn't even rank as an annoyance--It's just the way the work.

ratpoison doesn't do well with any app you may want floating windows with i.e gimp. rp can do multiple workspaces, but it's
not in its nature.

The only peculiar( not really ) thing about ion3 is all the lua scripts...lua lua lua.

As for dwm, my urxvt borders are a bit wonky in tile mode, but I imagine it will be fixed shortly. Any customization
has to be done at compile time.

You'll never know until you try them all. Pacman is your friend.

Last edited by dk (2007-04-22 20:50:20)

Mandor · 2007-04-22 21:22:13

First, thank you for the answers, especially pauldonnelly was really detailed in what it's all about - window management.

As I mentioned, I gave the three WMs a try, besides reading docs and googling shots, before posting, but only for a limited time. I had some troubles with running wmii , but it's my fault, I suppose. From my experience ion3 feels nicest, but things are a way different from standard WM , so after a while this may change (That's why I seek experience). I will give ratpoison a try for sure now.

Edit: Just tell me the truth, even if it hurts - is the C-t keybinding redefinable? Now I now why I felt strange about rapoison - it seems somehow emasc-ish

Last edited by Mandor (2007-04-22 21:35:59)

beza1e1 · 2007-04-22 21:45:49

tbroderick wrote:

What is wrong with Unicode in dwm? Seems to work fine for me.

dwm takes the title text from stdin and doesn't like utf-8 encoded stuff there, last time i tried. (roughly two months ago)

pauldonnelly · 2007-04-23 00:43:47

Mandor wrote:

Edit: Just tell me the truth, even if it hurts - is the C-t keybinding redefinable? Now I now why I felt strange about rapoison - it seems somehow emasc-ish

Yes, it is. I put that in my post, but it's so big I'm not surprised you missed it. You can bind the escape key to a single key or to a key combo. I find the Windows key to be a good choice (and more useful that it ever was in windows ). As far as I know, you can't invoke Ratpoison commands directly with a single keypress. Meaning that if you have a fancy multimedia keyboard and want to have a dedicated "split screen" or "other window" key, you would need to do that with xbindkeys and a command line invocation (e.g. ratpoison -c split or ratpoison -c focus, respectively).

F · 2007-04-23 04:10:11

****
I Love Wmii
****

tbroderick · 2007-04-23 06:26:27

beza1e1 wrote:

dwm takes the title text from stdin and doesn't like utf-8 encoded stuff there, last time i tried. (roughly two months ago)

Don't think it a problem anymore. I use en_utf8, have mpd (artist - song) read from stdin to status area, and it has no problems displaying è, ã, â, etc. Or in the firefox title when visiting non-english pages.

Mandor · 2007-04-23 07:42:52

pauldonnelly wrote:

Yes, it is. I put that in my post, but it's so big I'm not surprised you missed it.

Well, I was a bit tired last night, my mind seem to have totally lost the relation between ^ and C

iphitus · 2007-04-23 08:47:50

tbroderick wrote:

beza1e1 wrote:
dwm takes the title text from stdin and doesn't like utf-8 encoded stuff there, last time i tried. (roughly two months ago)
Don't think it a problem anymore. I use en_utf8, have mpd (artist - song) read from stdin to status area, and it has no problems displaying è, ã, â, etc. Or in the firefox title when visiting non-english pages.

http://www.h.shuttle.de/mitch/dwm-mitch.en.html

he's got a patch, 05 in his dwm patchset, which might fix this. It should apply, but it might depend on his other patches.

James

dolby · 2007-04-23 19:28:53

now theres also xmonad in aur which is supposed to be very similar to dwm. still very early in devel though

bender02 · 2007-04-23 20:15:34

pauldonnelly: how do you make ratpoison unmanage rox-panel? (I tried :unmanage ROX-Panel, but it doesn't work for some reason.)
By the way, thanks for the tip - I didn't know you can do this kind of things with ratpoison.

EDIT: Oh, nevermind, I got it: :unmanage ROX-Filer and :set padding 0 0 0 50

Last edited by bender02 (2007-04-23 23:58:41)

geek.arnuld · 2007-11-26 18:49:56

pauldonnelly wrote:

The three (and I'll throw in Ratpoison because I love it) seem to have distinct approaches to the way you're expected to use windows.
...[SNIPPED whole article ].......

This is One of the best articles written on Ratpoison

jbromley · 2007-11-26 22:35:41

pauldonnelly wrote:

The three (and I'll throw in Ratpoison because I love it) seem to have distinct approaches to the way you're expected to use windows....

Very nice ratpoison post. I am a ratpoison user and I learned something. I wasn't aware of the padding variable, so I resorted to some scripting nastiness to set up an area for my conky. Of course, it was a bad kludge because of ratpoison's model of not attaching windows to frames. Using padding allowed me to greatly simplify things. Thanks.

Now here's my take on these window managers. I've used mostly ratpoison and ion3, but I have also experimented with dwm, awesome, xmonad and wmii.

I cannot really add much about ratpoison. You can get a script with the source code that allows for workspaces (rpws). This allows me to keep eight windows all visible within a single keypress. (I've got a 1920x1200 screen, so I normally have two vertical panes in each workspace.)

Ion3 and wmii are very similar, as least as far as managing windows go. One difference is that ion3 uses tabs for multiple windows in a frame, while wmii has "stacked" windows where you see one main window in a column and then only the title bars of the other applications. I like ion better since it is more space efficient. Configuring either one is a bit odd, ion3 with Lua and wmii with its libixp stuff. Ion3 provides a nice "scratch pad" window where you can quickly open a floating window and show and hide it with a single keypress. Wmii provides a nice docking area. The default key bindings for ion3 are a bit complicated, but one gets used to it. Also, I use Lua for other things, so configuring ion3 wasn't a big deal.

The awesome/dwm/xmonad family seem to want you to have one main window in one column and then divides the other column by all of your other windows. I tried these but found I didn't like it that much since having one column split between several applications didn't make sense. Of these, xmonad was the most interesting for its plethora of extensions. Perhaps I would try out xmonad again if I can find an extension that does window layouts like ion3. dwm and xmonad require code changes and recompiling for configuration changes. awesome is basically dwm with a config file.

vogt · 2007-11-26 23:25:59

jbromley wrote:

The awesome/dwm/xmonad family seem to want you to have one main window in one column and then divides the other column by all of your other windows. I tried these but found I didn't like it that much since having one column split between several applications didn't make sense. Of these, xmonad was the most interesting for its plethora of extensions. Perhaps I would try out xmonad again if I can find an extension that does window layouts like ion3. dwm and xmonad require code changes and recompiling for configuration changes. awesome is basically dwm with a config file.

I'll add that xmonad (the contributed modules) includes other layouts. Some of them seem better in principle, like mosaicAlt, which takes a specified area for each window, and then produces the layout with the least weighted undesirable aspect ratios: you choose size and aspect: it seems optimal, but it's up to you to decide (if you try) whether increased complexity in navigation and control justifies the flexibility you get from that tiling mode.

By the way, there are a couple of other approaches, but in my opinion the 'tall' layout that jbromley described is pretty optimal for <4 windows (which is 99% of the time).

EDIT: PS: As far as configuration goes, if you make mistakes (in spite of the decent documentation) the error messages provided by the compiler (ghc) aren't usually helpful (unless you have experiece with haskell).

Last edited by vogt (2007-11-26 23:45:32)

semdornus · 2007-11-27 01:21:01

jbromley wrote:

Perhaps I would try out xmonad again if I can find an extension that does window layouts like ion3

Just noting that if you mean ion3's tabbed layout; you can already get that with xmonad. The amount of contributed layouts is gradually increasing and has enough variants (at least for me) to be able to create pretty much whatever you can think of. There's also a combo layout which allows you to combine multiple layouts in one workspace with all the configuration those layouts offer. For example tiling in the left 1/3 and tabbed on the right 2/3 of the screen.

Starting from 0.5 (which is now in testing) you have the configuration in your home directory. It still remains haskell, but has become somewhat easier as you only have to override the defaults if you want to. When inside xmonad you can reload it with the new configuration. This reload actually recompiles xmonad with the new configuration (and falls back to the previous config if recompilation fails).

The documentation for the extensions (for 0.5) is currently being overhauled. You can see the work in progress here for a description of the various layouts. For some of those screenshots can be found here.

Edit: typo

Last edited by semdornus (2007-11-27 05:17:44)

Xilon · 2007-11-27 03:52:01

I haven't used ion3 for long, so apart from saying that it is quite flexible in terms of layout, I won't comment on it.

I started with dwm in the tiling world of window managers. It's nice and simple, but perhaps too simple, at least for me. The tags are static (you can't create new ones or even change the name of an existing one at run time), the layouts are very restrictive, maybe some patches are available. The statusbar gets annoying after a while, you need to hack around the fact that you can only pipe one stream of text into it, so if you need scripts to have different update intervals (which you will if you want it to be efficient), it gets messy. Also compiling it every time you change something can get annoying, I'd suggest configuring it in Xnest and once you have it right just restart X and get into dwm. It's a nice wm if you don't mind those things though, a lot of people don't.

wmii is much, much, much more powerful. The tiling is not that great, but it's not as restrictive as dwm. You can't have sublayouts like in ion3, but you can have more columns at least, and resize more windows (rows). Tags can be dynamically created and deleted, so I find it a lot nicer for organising stuff, since I don't always do the same stuff and just don't bother when something is static. The really cool thing about wmii is that the statusbar is "file based", and you can control it externally. That means that you can make "hooks" for various applications which update the statusbar for you, so instead of polling for info all the time, like in dwm, (inefficient, you are now just posting information when it gets updated, in some cases anyway. I for instance had mutt run a script which updated a "new mail" counter every time I quit it, and also a cron job ran the same script right after it ran fdm .

Both WMs can view multiple tags at a time, or make a window have multiple tags, which is cool. Both also have a really cool feature of specifying which tag(s) a particular window starts on, so firefox would always start on the "internet" tag.

The biggest disadvantages of tiling wms that I find are the lack of tray support and some programs just aren't made for tiling. There's trayer, but it's not nicely integrated with the statusbar of these WMs, and usually gets in the way, and is counted as a windows, so it's closable (unless I just set it up wrong) and annoying.

Last edited by Xilon (2007-11-27 03:52:26)

thayer · 2007-11-27 04:05:27

Xmonad is indeed under rapid development and getting more amazing every day. Not only does it provide tabbed panes now, but the next release (0.5) and current development version (xmonad-darcs) can be recompiled on the fly--no need to rebuild/reinstall the package manually--simply press Mod+q and it's done. Great stuff!

shining · 2007-11-27 12:14:38

Xilon wrote:

The really cool thing about wmii is that the statusbar is "file based", and you can control it externally. That means that you can make "hooks" for various applications which update the statusbar for you, so instead of polling for info all the time, like in dwm, (inefficient, you are now just posting information when it gets updated, in some cases anyway. I for instance had mutt run a script which updated a "new mail" counter every time I quit it, and also a cron job ran the same script right after it ran fdm .

I remember you mentioned that on IRC a while ago. It still looks pointless to me.
Polling the mails is probably more costly in the first place, since it requires a network connection, and you have to use polling there anyway. But everyone does it, and it's not a big problem, or is it?
So I don't see how polling the filesystem after that is worse.
Besides, I dislike the idea how launching / exiting mutt all the time. Since you are talking about efficiency, that is really inefficient
In any cases, I prefer just letting mutt run in a screen session a long time.

I'm not denying that wmii status bar is cool, just that I don't find it very practical.

jbromley · 2007-11-27 18:53:13

semdornus wrote:

jbromley wrote:
Perhaps I would try out xmonad again if I can find an extension that does window layouts like ion3
Just noting that if you mean ion3's tabbed layout; you can already get that with xmonad. The amount of contributed layouts is gradually increasing and has enough variants (at least for me) to be able to create pretty much whatever you can think of.

Yes, when I tried xmonad a couple of months ago, I noted that there was a tabbed layout extension. I tried it and found that it created a single tabbed window that occupied my entire screen. This would be OK, except that I have a 17" 1920x1200 screen, so I almost never run anything full screen. Have you ever tried reading a man page with more than 256 columns? It's like watching tennis.

Anyway, I tried to get a two-column layout with each column containing a tabbed layout pane, but I failed. I admit my Haskell skills are null and I probably didn't completely understand how to configure xmonad but I needed to get to work instead of futzing around with my window manager. It seems a lot of work is going into xmonad, so I'll probably try it out again when I get some play time.

Regards.

thayer · 2007-11-27 18:58:45

xmonad multi-pane tabbing in action:

http://haskell.org/sitewiki/images/4/40 … wopane.jpg

jbromley · 2007-11-27 19:02:28

thayer wrote:

xmonad multi-pane tabbing in action:
http://haskell.org/sitewiki/images/4/40 … wopane.jpg

OK, that is awesome. Would you mind making your configuration Haskell source available? Do I need any other extensions other than the tabbed layout extension? I definitely want to try this out.

Thanks!

thayer · 2007-11-27 20:36:28

jbromley wrote:

thayer wrote:
xmonad multi-pane tabbing in action:
http://haskell.org/sitewiki/images/4/40 … wopane.jpg
OK, that is awesome. Would you mind making your configuration Haskell source available? Do I need any other extensions other than the tabbed layout extension? I definitely want to try this out.
Thanks!

Alas, that is not my screenshot, but one from the gallery:

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Screenshots

I suggest checking out the sample config page here:
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive

and particularly Andrea Rossato's xmonad.hs here:
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/C … _xmonad.hs

as he/she uses the tabbed layout and his/her config is included as a module in the Contrib library.

Last edited by thayer (2007-11-28 00:58:36)

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#1 2007-04-22 09:23:36

What's the difference in the user experience of ion3, wmii and dwm.

#2 2007-04-22 14:23:47

Re: What's the difference in the user experience of ion3, wmii and dwm.

#3 2007-04-22 19:34:15

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#4 2007-04-22 19:47:40

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#5 2007-04-22 20:19:38

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#6 2007-04-22 21:22:13

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#7 2007-04-22 21:45:49

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#8 2007-04-23 00:43:47

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#9 2007-04-23 04:10:11

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#10 2007-04-23 06:26:27

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#11 2007-04-23 07:42:52

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#12 2007-04-23 08:47:50

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#14 2007-04-23 20:15:34

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#15 2007-11-26 18:49:56

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#16 2007-11-26 22:35:41

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#17 2007-11-26 23:25:59

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#18 2007-11-27 01:21:01

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#19 2007-11-27 03:52:01

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#20 2007-11-27 04:05:27

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#21 2007-11-27 12:14:38

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#22 2007-11-27 18:53:13

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#23 2007-11-27 18:58:45

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#24 2007-11-27 19:02:28

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#25 2007-11-27 20:36:28

Re: What's the difference in the user experience of ion3, wmii and dwm.

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