Tiling Window Managers

[Miven]

Has anyone tried compiling i3 from scratch? I just did. Nasty dependency hell. libxcb was missing a header, had download it separately. Very strange.

libpthread-stubs-0.3.tar.gz, libxcb-1.9.tar.gz, xcb-proto-1.8.tar.gz, xcb-util-0.3.9.tar.gz, libXau-1.0.7.tar.bz2, xproto-7.0.23.tar.bz2, oh yeah, cairo-1.0.0, that little punk:

It finally broke at cairo --enable-xcb. I think cairo's xcb extension was written by drunkards It couldn't find it's own headers. One file looks in usr/X11R6/include/X11/XCB/, when it's actually called xcb/, another file looks in X11R6/include/XCB/, can't seem to make up it's mind where to look, and when I made some symlinks so it could, it still can't figure out what a cairo_surface_t * is. I dunno, it's sitting right there at the beginning of cairo.h. *shrug* I know if I upgrade cairo again, gtk/pango/etc are going to riot in the streets, and I don't want that. Bummer.

Anyway, it looked interesting. I wanted to give it a go. A bit of a paradigm shift. And I do agree that a single workspace with everything overlapping each other is a silly thing that came from win95 and should be taken out back and shot.

[oz]

For anyone that might be interested, the ArchLinux Wiki has a nice chart comparing some of the features on a number of the more popular tiling WMs:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...indow_Managers

Edit: just found the following comparison chart and window managers listing, too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compar...indow_managers

http://www.gilesorr.com/wm/table.html

Has anyone tried compiling i3 from scratch? I just did. Nasty dependency hell. libxcb was missing a header, had download it separately. Very strange.

No, my own i3 installation came from the Arch binary package. It didn't seem to have as many dependencies as did Awesome and Xmonad. I ended up passing on installing Xmonad because it wanted to install almost 1GB of extra packages and I'm trying to keep package count and overall system size smaller if possible. Otherwise, Xmonad looked great.

[oz]

I once tried dwm, which you configure by recompiling it with different constants. I found it quite useful for certain editing tasks, where you have to compare a copy with an original; with a tiling wm you don't keep losing one of them by incautiously clicking in the wrong place.

Hazel, if you liked DWM, another one you might like that was based on it would be MonsterWM:

https://github.com/c00kiemon5ter/monsterwm

It's currently a little lighter than DWM since it contains less than 700 lines of code. I'm using it at the moment and it has quickly become my favorite of the eight different tilers that I've tried thus far. Like DWM, it's configures from direct compiles.

[hazel]

Hazel, if you liked DWM, another one you might like that was based on it would be MonsterWM:

https://github.com/c00kiemon5ter/monsterwm

It's currently a little lighter than DWM since it contains less than 700 lines of code. I'm using it at the moment and it has quickly become my favorite of the eight different tilers that I've tried thus far. Like DWM, it's configures from direct compiles.

Who said I liked dwm? I said it was useful for certain editing tasks but very ugly. And I still stand by that. I may not care much for eye-candy but I don't want an ugly desktop either.

[oz]

Who said I liked dwm? I said it was useful for certain editing tasks but very ugly. And I still stand by that. I may not care much for eye-candy but I don't want an ugly desktop either.

Don't know but it wasn't me! ...that's why I was careful to say "if you liked DWM" rather than "since" you liked it. I don't see it as all that ugly myself, but I don't spend a lot of time admiring my desktops either, so I might not be a very good judge of overall desktop ugliness. Again, Linux serves us well by offering so many options.

For those that haven't seen DWM, you can get a look at it on their website entry page:

suckless.org dwm - dynamic window manager

When I look at it, I actually kind of like it, and apparently others do as well, because it is quite popular among tiler users. Most tiling window managers are somewhat themeable, but it's just that they don't have a lot of decorations available to theme. Even the wallpapers are covered up by windows except for initial logins, or when you are using a floating window layout. Awesome window manager (also very popular) seems to be more embellished by default than most of those tilers that that I've tried.

A few shots of Awesome WM themes can be seen here:

Beautiful themes - awesome

[Miven]

Thank for that link, oz.

I like dwm. 1 .c file, 1 .h file, the whole tarball is only 20k! It compiles in 5 seconds. Neat-o.

Bit of a steep learning curve though. I have so many keyboard shortcuts I've been using so long they're ingrained. I already tried posting this message from dwm, but then I did something by habit and it shut down all my windows.

I guess I'll just have to hack at it until it does exactly what I want.

[oz]

Thank for that link, oz.

I like dwm. 1 .c file, 1 .h file, the whole tarball is only 20k! It compiles in 5 seconds. Neat-o.

Bit of a steep learning curve though. I have so many keyboard shortcuts I've been using so long they're ingrained. I already tried posting this message from dwm, but then I did something by habit and it shut down all my windows.

I guess I'll just have to hack at it until it does exactly what I want.

You are welcome!

The keyboard and mouse bindings can be changed, but I'd personally recommend trying for a while to adjust to the default bindings before doing so.

[Miven]

Yep. I did. But I'm a crusty old dog stuck in my ways, so I'm gonna make it do things my way.

I don't know if you've checked that thread about the UEFI stuff, but I think there is a parallel going on here:

dwm reminds me of linux in the old days. Bare metal ugliness that *really* works, and will scare the dozers away. Keep your fingers out or you'll lose them. There's no enameled and clear-coated fibreglass cowlings, no plush bucket seats with bum-warmers, no air-conditioning or airbags, none of those headlights with little wipers on them, it doesn't even come with a clock!

More like a mud-splattered dirt bike than a BMW.

Peace and Cheer.

[oz]

Miven, if you should become a big fan of dwm and find yourself wanting more info, be sure to check the Arch Linux site because they have a good wiki page on it, and they have several active forum threads with lots of scripts and configs that might come in handy for you:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dwm

Check the bottom of the wiki page for links to the special forum threads.

[Miven]

dwm: my new favorite program. It's all about hacking. It took me half a day to understand what it was and how it did it, and another half day to tweak it perfectly to my needs. It packs a lotta punch into 60k of text, and half of it is unused, leftovers from others' hacking expeditions.

Here's an amusing anecdote about desktop management:

We felt like watching an episode of an old sitcom, but my wife has the better monitor. So we sit down at her PC with our bowls of delicious home made chicken soup, mine with fresh cracked pepper.

She runs gnome and nautilus. I reach over, grab the mouse, scroll down to the directory, go to right-click on it, and at that very moment I had a sudden and quite violent sneeze. Yes, I covered up and didn't get any into my soup. When I look up to click on the directory again, it was gone! Vanished! WTF?!?

So I poked around a bit, thinking I somehow dragged it onto her desktop by accident or something. I cannot find it. So I head back over to my PC (dwm/mc), and used mc to scan her home dir. Lo and Behold the directory I was going to click is now sitting _inside_ the directory that was right beside it in the file listing. I move it to its parent dir and all is good, but now my soup is getting cold.

I guess what I did when I sneezed, is clicked, dragged, and released over the other dir, therefore altering the directory structure with 1 little mouse gesture. This is 1 of the reasons I don't like nautilus, or any fm with that sort of interface.

This would be impossible on my PC, it's pretty hard to hit F6-ENTER by accident, and even then you would be able to see what just happened.