Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?

Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?

Do you prefer keyboard-driven window manager? and how do you arrange your windows to be more efficient?

Somewhat customized Openbox. Six workspaces, everything keybound. I make heavy use of alt-drag and alt-middle-drag to move and resize windows without needing to find their targets. Control-fkeys for frequently opened apps like gnome-term, chromium, etc. Each workspace is a discrete task: writing code, testing, email/IM, etc. Helps keep me focused.

What I love about OB is that everything is configurable. A lot of WMs (ahem, metacity) give you no control over the basic operations because they can't imagine any other way to do it. If you find faster ways to do things, e.g. workspace warping with mousewheel, or reordering windows with win+middle click) OB actually lets you achieve them. It's all there in XML--and the defaults are well thought out, too.

I know several people who swear by xmonad, but I've never been able to deal with it for graphical work.

WindowMaker. I wish it were more keyboard driven, but I find it's window arrangement and Xinerama support to be the crucial features.

I've also been meaning to give a modern tiling window manager (I've used ratpoison in the past) e.g., Xmonad a try.

I've tried a dozen window managers for weeks at a time. For over a decade I always returned to my old reliable WindowMaker. In the past couple years I started using Metacity (default in Gnome now).

All I care about is having separate workspaces and a few keyboard shortcuts. I have 7 work spaces: Main (local terminal), Browsing (Chrome/Firefox), Communications (Pidgin/XChat/Skype), Development (GVim/terminal), Email (Thunderbird/GMail), Shells (tabbed remote terminals), Misc (usually shells/music player).

Each workspace is dedicate to a single task. Everything is fully maximized in each workspace (for the most part). I switch between them with Alt+{1,7}. Ctrl+M Maximizes a window. I have a few monitoring applets (CPU/network) in the taskbar thingie. Over time I've found that is all I need to be happy and productive.

I've used Fluxbox and Blackbox basically since I was in diapers, but I recently decided that it's really way past time to try a tiling WM, and settled on xmonad after initially trying awesome. I like it a lot so far; it's lightweight, flexible, and very easy to configure, and I'm surprised how little I miss dragging windows around (although I still float some frequently used applications, Chrome and Audacious primary among them.)

I usually have a workspace for shell & filesystem stuff, one for emacs, one for documentation, one for running servers and monitors and other misc. utils for whatever I'm doing, and one floating one for web browser and music.