XFCE, a rather minimal window manager I find perfect for my desktop and development machine. http://www.xfce.org
Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
21–30 of 69 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#22After 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.
As I work with dual screen linux connected to a remote windows XP/7 desktop running in VMWare/HyperV, I have a screen for tiled urxvt terminals connected to the servers running the processes I manage, with a floating rdesktop session hiding it most of the time. The other screen is set to 'floating' for emails, web browsing and local terminals sessions.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#23I 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…
I read that as "(256) (color rxvt-unicode windows)". Good god, man! ;-)
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#24I was surprised to find that no one else has recommended dwm[1], which is what Xmonad (and others) are based on[2].
It's tiling, keyboard-driven, small and lightweight. I've been using it for years now. It's a little hairy to start with, but I love it.
Instead of workspaces it uses "tags" which you can treat just like workspaces, but you can also combine, on-the-fly, to form a mashup of different tasks. For example, sometimes I want my editor & web browser next to each other, when I'm looking something up, but most of the time I just want to focus on the code.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#25I use awesome (http://awesome.naquadah.org/), a tiling wm.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#26I've been using blackbox for many years ( after using afterstep and windowmaker) but recently turned to stumpwm, a tiling wm written in lisp[http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/]. Getting used to it but i think i'll keep it, i like tiling wm . Never been a fan of gnome or kde, and never need all things they carry i prefer a simple window manager.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#27I 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.
I miss Ion3. But I use dwm now!
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#28I use Awesome WM. It was my first foray into the tiling WM world, and I am currently loving it. I have two monitors. I usually have whatever main task I'm working with on my main widescreen, and then a bunch of terminals with various programs (ncmpcpp, irssi, etc) on my old 17 inch monitor.
Awesome is great because of its use of the keyboard and tag system. Also, it is named after one of Barney Stinson's catchphrases.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#29StumpWM.
Tiled and programmable in Common Lisp. It's fun to config/hack.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#30Xmonad, 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. [1] http://xmonad.org/tour.html
Another vote for xmonad. I have been using xmonad on my desktop for most of this year, and it has worked amazingly well, and definitely has one of the best multi-monitor setups I've ever used.
One of the most impressive things is how well it has worked out of the box, so well that I basically forgot to come back and customize, its just been working for quite a while now.