Arch Linux

archprentice

Member

Registered: 2009-02-23

Posts: 3

Questions regarding xft fonts, and awesome wm

Hi, I just tried ArchLinux yesterday and loving it!
I use JWM, but am very interested in dwm/awesome wm. I do have some questions:

1. On a thread in the forum, it is mentioned that dwm has no Xft support. How useful exactly is Xft? Would it impact on design work involving GIMP/Inkscape/Scribus?

2. Does awesome have Xft support?

3. I installed awesome, but I have no idea on what keys to use. The shortcuts are different from dwm. I tried to look for quick tutorial just to get the basics (dwm has one on their website), but seems like all documentation I found have none of that section and go straight to configuration.
Do I actually have to configure the wm before I can use it at a very basic level?

4. I would like to do some more comparison between wms, trying to find a good balance for me in regards of lightness and functions I need. However, I have no idea on what to use to keep track of cpu/memory usage for all the wms. What's a good way to do this?

Thank you in advance.

fflarex

Member

Registered: 2007-09-15

Posts: 466

Re: Questions regarding xft fonts, and awesome wm

Welcome to Arch!

1. The lack of xft support in dwm mostly just means that you won't get anti-aliased fonts in the status bar. Individual applications will still have the same font support they had before you used dwm.

2. Awesome uses pango for font rendering, which is even better than xft.

3. Look at the man page for default key bindings. It's more or less usable out of the box, but you will definitely want to customize it somehow.

4. A good system monitor is htop. Install it from the repos and run it from a terminal.

Last edited by fflarex (2009-02-23 18:44:45)