Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

31–40 of 69 posts

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

#31
The tiling, keyboard-driven Xmonad on Linux, but then I got fed up of the look and feel of Linux in general and bailed to OS X completely (with a more basic helper, SizeUp).

I like a main window taking the left 60% of the screen and the remainder for 2 aux windows stacked vertically.

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

#32

I 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…

Awesome is great partly because it's small, nimble and fast. It's one of those rare pieces of software that manages to feel infinitely useful while combating bloat at the same time.

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

#33
post #2

I use sawfish. It is very lightweight, configurable, supports plenty of keyboard shortcuts and generally stays out of my way. I have keyboard shortcuts for most simple operations (change workspace, change window, send to back, etc.) and use the mouse when that sort of thing makes sense. I try to stick to 'one task-type per workspace' which helps keep things somewhat organized (plus it keeps my browser in hiding while…

I use this as well. I have a bunch of self-written mods that I really should push out somewhere.

I started using it when it was the default WM for gnome, and had so many customizations that I couldn't switch away when metacity came out.

Things like windows7-ish tiling (I had it before windows 7, when someone using another WM could do it).

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

#34
I currently use awesome wm but I run slim so I can login to any number of window managers. I was using xfce4 for a few months and still think it's a great environment. I also mess around with fluxbox. After seeing so many people rave about xmonad I'm going to give it a try as well.

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

#36
post #14

I 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 ha…

Another vote for fvwm. I've customized it pretty heavily over the years:

I have a single config file that detects which host its running on and modifies fvwm's behavior accordingly. This way I can have the same configuration work well on the desktop and the netbook.

It works well on the netbook, too, as its very resource-friendly.

I have it set up with a 3x3 virtual desktop space and no edge resistance. The "Windows" key pops up the virtual desktop manager.

Also, I have it configured so that when I hit the "Menu" key or CTRL-Windows I get the root menu, so it's reasonably keyboard friendly. (e.g. CTRL-Windows,T gets me a terminal; CTRL-Windows,N,W gives a browser.)

Not that I use those, really, since I have F1 on the root window bound to "launch terminal", and F2 to "launch browser".

FVMW doesn't work as well as others out-of-the-box, but you can pretty much make it do anything if you tweak the config enough. But that's work, so you gotta wannit.

I really wish it was a compositing window manager, but it's not, and it doesn't seem likely to be.

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

#37
post #9

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…

Why do you float Chrome windows? Web browsers and terminals are the easiest applications to tile.

I do occasionally get weirdness with tiling Chrome (though I still do it), when websites try to resize their windows and my window manager won't let it. Some crazy websites depend on multiple sized/moved windows as well, e.g. this thing won't work unless I float the browser: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646430

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

#38

I 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…

The problem I have with awesome is that it likes to make you write new configs every other release. That's why I'm still stuck with a fairly old version.

Now that they kicked xcb out of cairo (which awesome needs) which resulted in awesome getting kicked out of the arch linux community repository I think I'll just switch to i3 like all of my buddies.

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

#40
post #17

ratpoison, because it actually manages those pesky windows.

ratpoison was my first tiling wm. i remember how it made me feeling like a total newbie =) its lack of a floating mode (needed for gimp and others) made me switch to more advanced wms though.
Post reply on HN