Openbox for me - extremely customizable, standards compliant, and very keyboard friendly. Good theming, well written code.
Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
11–20 of 69 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#12I'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…
Why do you float Chrome windows? Web browsers and terminals are the easiest applications to tile.
Honestly, there's no good reason at all. I'm just so used to resizing my web browser with the mouse all the time to read things better. I should probably break that habit.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#13twm ;)
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#14I like fvwm - http://fvwm.org/ - I can change the size of windows on all sides, and the width of the borders is easily configurable.
(Everything else is as well, but those are the things I particularly like over other window managers I have seen.)
I would like to try running Xmonad on a second monitor, and use that monitor for xterms primarily - I don't want my browser window-size to change with how many windows I have open - but I haven't had time/monitors to experiment.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#15Xmonad, one of the best tiling window managers out there. It is very easy to grasp for beginners[1], has a comprehensive documentation and is extremely powerful under the hood. The configuration is in Haskell, which makes it Turing-complete, but you can customize Xmonad even if you are not familiar with the language.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#16
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#17ratpoison, because it actually manages those pesky windows.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#18Evilwm: http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/
It can spawn a terminal with one keystroke, can move and resize windows, and has virtual desktops. Other than that, it gets the hell out of my way -- no extraneous bars / panels / whatever, and one-pixel-wide window borders. That's all I ever want a WM to do.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#19I use wmii with some minor customizations. I have one 30" full of 256-color rxvt-unicode windows and a smaller monitor running chromium. Generally communications (mutt, irssi) runs down the right edge of the 30" and then there are 2-3 columns of terminals running vim or zsh. One killer feature of wmii is its use of 'tags' instead of virtual desktops. Windows can be assigned to multiple tags. I tend to have tags per t…
+1 for wmii ! I was using ion3 until 2008 and migrate to wmii at this time.
I'm mainly using OSX now but I always have my wmii open in a virtual box.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#20After using windowmaker, I switched to awesome and I am not looking back. The install is tiny, and it starts instantly, unlike KDE. The tiling is very nice. The configuration is in lua but I haven't been annoyed by anything enough to bother modifying it.