Help me pick a tiling wm :)

cardinals_fan · 2008-05-15 03:09:27

I want to try out a tiling WM. I tested out Awesome, and while I definitely like tiling, it was too buggy for me to use day-to-day. So now I want to try either dwm, wmii, or Xmonad. I need configurable keybindings and reasonably simple config files. What do most Archers prefer?

ScriptDevil · 2008-05-15 04:43:15

Well. All three excel at these... Most archers were dwmers and Xmonaders. But some switched to awesome.

In my opinion, if you know Haskell, Xmonad is all you need. I personally love it.

Dwm is real lightning. key bindings are configurable here too

Wmii is like the linux of WMs. You actually have a virtual file system like the /proc. You can access this with wmiir and you can edit your windows. Very cool .

Overall, it will come to around 5 mb. Why dont you try each one in turn. Say WMII -> Dwm -> XMonad. In case you know haskell, you can reverse the order.

ScriptDevil · 2008-05-15 04:44:12

And hey. Try evilwm. It is neither tiling. Nor is it configurable. But it has a lot of appeal attached to it

Gigamo · 2008-05-15 09:04:53

What was buggy with Awesome? Except if you were using awesome-3, which is supposed to be buggy, I don't see what could have been wrong. Ah well

Mr.Elendig · 2008-05-15 14:03:50

wmii and xmonad are both excellent. But wmii might be a bit easier to get, and imo it's better "out of the box". (less tweaking needed)

ozar · 2008-05-15 17:20:03

I liked wmii quite well the last time I used it.

cardinals_fan · 2008-05-15 23:07:11

I think that I'll start with wmii, then try dwm and Xmonad.

phrakture · 2008-05-16 04:26:03

ScriptDevil wrote:

And hey. Try evilwm. It is neither tiling. Nor is it configurable. But it has a lot of appeal attached to it

For the record, I use evilwm (well, with some random custom changes). I used ratpoison for years.

Neither of these WMs are "tiling". They are one step down in the minimalism chart.

I doubt I'll go back to ratpoison. I do miss the config file, you could do A LOT with it, but evilwm is more enjoyable to use.

jbromley · 2008-05-16 04:32:58

I use wmii and occasionally stumpwm when I feel like Lisp hacking. Ruby-wmii is a nice way to get some extra features with wmii. For me wmii allows me just the right amount of window control with its ability to switch a column between default and stacked mode.

I've tried dwm, awesome, xmonad and the one thing I found I couldn't get used to was how they divide the screen into a master column which holds one (by default) app and the rest of your apps get stacked in the second column. Nonetheless, these three seem to be pretty popular among users of tiling wms recently.

Ratpoison/stumpwm have a completely different window/frame paradigm. In particular windows (apps) are not necessarily bound to any particular frame. This takes a little getting used to.

Regards,
j

cardinals_fan · 2008-05-16 04:34:06

jbromley wrote:

I use wmii and occasionally stumpwm when I feel like Lisp hacking. Ruby-wmii is a nice way to get some extra features with wmii. For me wmii allows me just the right amount of window control with its ability to switch a column between default and stacked mode.

Sounds perfect, as I'm planning on learning Ruby this summer

jbromley · 2008-05-16 19:14:27

Cool, you can get more info on ruby-wmii here.

CuleX · 2008-05-17 13:36:48

Why don't give ion3 a shot? http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=16754
Of course, the license has a "special" clause, but the WM itself is great. Even tough it uses Lua, it's pretty neat.

To wmii:
I don't really feel like creating wmii-perl. The default shell-thingy is... meh. I don't like it. I won't install p9p for a window manager. wmii-python and wmii-ruby aren't what i like. I dislike both languages.

cardinals_fan · 2008-05-22 04:02:51

Wmii didn't impress me, but Xmonad is great. It think that I'll stay here

One quick question: how are people using Conky with tiling WM's. It runs OK when not in its own window, but things that update frequently (cpu usage, clock, etc) disappear and reappear every time that they update.

Last edited by cardinals_fan (2008-05-22 05:36:06)

turska · 2008-05-22 06:47:17

Enable double buffering in your conkyrc or pipe conky-cli to xmobar or dzen2.

iBertus · 2008-05-22 16:09:58

I thought about installing xmonad, but refuse to install a 60MB large ghc compiler that I'm never going to use for anything besides xmonad Seems pointless.

cardinals_fan · 2008-05-23 01:02:04

turska wrote:

Enable double buffering in your conkyrc or pipe conky-cli to xmobar or dzen2.

If I set conky to use it's own window, Xmonad tries to tile it and things get ugly. So, I set own_window to no. This works fine with my conkys that run only periodically (like my grade-monitoring script), but the frequently-updated ones (resource usage, clock, etc.) disappear and reappear every time that they update. It's not flickering (where the windows above flicker), but the actual disappearence of my conky. Is xmobar nice?

fuscia · 2008-05-24 13:07:45

cardinals_fan wrote:

turska wrote:
Enable double buffering in your conkyrc or pipe conky-cli to xmobar or dzen2.
If I set conky to use it's own window, Xmonad tries to tile it and things get ugly. So, I set own_window to no. This works fine with my conkys that run only periodically (like my grade-monitoring script), but the frequently-updated ones (resource usage, clock, etc.) disappear and reappear every time that they update. It's not flickering (where the windows above flicker), but the actual disappearence of my conky. Is xmobar nice?

have you tried setting conky as one of the apps that floats? (if you look in .xmonad/xmonad.hs, you should see a list of the apps set to float (gimp, mplayer and i forget what else). you could try adding conky to that list, in a similar manner.

sniffles · 2008-05-24 19:31:52

I currently use DWM; I don't know Haskell but non-the-less I heard Xmonad is pretty awesome. awesome is supposedly pretty awesome too; but by looking at awesome's configuration file I realised it wouldn't offer me anything dwm couldn't offer me.

But now, I'm thinking of giving dwm up aswell.

Before this I used to run OpenBOX and basically had it configured to remove window decorations, use a 1px border to delimit windows and had keybindings for managing my windows and virtual desktops. When I realised OpenBOX was kind of overkill for what I needed, I said I'd try something light, so I went the tiling window manager way, even though I didn't really understand how tiling WMs could get "anything" right [didn't know how they work at the time]; and now that I've tried some, I don't know what tiling can do (better?) for me than non-tiling WMs can.

BUT! This thread made a window manager come to my attention, mainly: evilwm. It seems like just the kind of things I was looking for, so I'm having good plans to switching to it.

Now to justify for this post, my recommendation to the original question: if you know some C, I say give DWM a shot. It's pretty easy to read & understand (and I'm not just talking about the C-header used as a configuration file...

vogt · 2008-05-24 20:01:59

iBertus wrote:

I thought about installing xmonad, but refuse to install a 60MB large ghc compiler that I'm never going to use for anything besides xmonad Seems pointless.
--
~ HOMEBREW GIS WORKSTATION ~
Intel Xeon Quad-Core X3220@3.0Ghz, 8.0GB PC2-6400 DDR, 2x750GB SATA HDD, GeForce 8800GT SC 512MB, Samsung SyncMaster 305T LCD, and Arch Linux!
~ HP PAVILION LAPTOP ~
AMD Turion X2 1.8Ghz, 4.0GB DDR2, 250GB HDD, GeForce 6150, 15.4" LCD with Arch Linux.

Which is why we live in a world of broadband connections and gigabyte (!) hard drives?

As they say in another context: if you don't use it, you loose it.

Last edited by vogt (2008-05-24 20:02:18)

cardinals_fan · 2008-05-24 20:04:49

I just dropped Xmonad for dwm. It's simpler and cleaner. I have only one problem: I can't figure out how to change the screen geometry! In my config.h file, on line 22, it says:

/* geometries, s{x,y,w,h} and bh are already initualized here */

How can I set these geometries?

skymt · 2008-05-24 20:13:15

dwm 5.0 will have a significant overhaul of the geometry configuration. The current one is something of a hack and not really ideal for end-user customization. Wait for the next release, use the latest development version, or revert back to 4.7, the previous clean version.

cardinals_fan · 2008-05-24 20:47:18

skymt wrote:

dwm 5.0 will have a significant overhaul of the geometry configuration. The current one is something of a hack and not really ideal for end-user customization. Wait for the next release, use the latest development version, or revert back to 4.7, the previous clean version.

Very good. Do you know when 5.0 will be released?

finferflu · 2008-05-24 20:50:51

phrakture wrote:

For the record, I use evilwm (well, with some random custom changes). I used ratpoison for years.
Neither of these WMs are "tiling". They are one step down in the minimalism chart.
I doubt I'll go back to ratpoison. I do miss the config file, you could do A LOT with it, but evilwm is more enjoyable to use.

How do you manage with no frames? I've used Ratpoison for a long time as well, but it was very hard for me to get back to floating mode and windows, in fact shortly after a period with Gnome I went back to wmii.

skymt · 2008-05-24 23:06:42

cardinals_fan wrote:

Very good. Do you know when 5.0 will be released?

When it's done. The major changes are there, it just needs to be tweaked and debugged until Anselm thinks it's ready. The development version is generally quite stable thanks to dogfooding by the main developers, you just need to watch for changes in the configuration (diff the new config.def.h against the copy from the last version you used each time you upgrade).

cardinals_fan · 2008-05-25 03:52:07

skymt wrote:

cardinals_fan wrote:
Very good. Do you know when 5.0 will be released?
When it's done. The major changes are there, it just needs to be tweaked and debugged until Anselm thinks it's ready. The development version is generally quite stable thanks to dogfooding by the main developers, you just need to watch for changes in the configuration (diff the new config.def.h against the copy from the last version you used each time you upgrade).

I think that I'll try it out on my new OpenSolaris install.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-05-15 03:09:27

Help me pick a tiling wm :)

#2 2008-05-15 04:43:15

Re: Help me pick a tiling wm :)

#3 2008-05-15 04:44:12

Re: Help me pick a tiling wm :)

#4 2008-05-15 09:04:53

Re: Help me pick a tiling wm :)

#5 2008-05-15 14:03:50

Re: Help me pick a tiling wm :)

#6 2008-05-15 17:20:03

Re: Help me pick a tiling wm :)

#7 2008-05-15 23:07:11

Re: Help me pick a tiling wm :)

#8 2008-05-16 04:26:03

Re: Help me pick a tiling wm :)

#9 2008-05-16 04:32:58

Re: Help me pick a tiling wm :)

#10 2008-05-16 04:34:06

Re: Help me pick a tiling wm :)

#11 2008-05-16 19:14:27

Re: Help me pick a tiling wm :)

#12 2008-05-17 13:36:48

Re: Help me pick a tiling wm :)

#13 2008-05-22 04:02:51

Re: Help me pick a tiling wm :)

#14 2008-05-22 06:47:17

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#15 2008-05-22 16:09:58

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#16 2008-05-23 01:02:04

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#17 2008-05-24 13:07:45

Re: Help me pick a tiling wm :)

#18 2008-05-24 19:31:52

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#19 2008-05-24 20:01:59

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#20 2008-05-24 20:04:49

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#21 2008-05-24 20:13:15

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#22 2008-05-24 20:47:18

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#23 2008-05-24 20:50:51

Re: Help me pick a tiling wm :)

#24 2008-05-24 23:06:42

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#25 2008-05-25 03:52:07

Re: Help me pick a tiling wm :)

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