I go with the (distribution) flow and use KDE/kwin. I dumped Gnome/metacity a while ago as it wouldn't do more than 12 desktops, while kwin gives me 20. F1-F12 for the first 12, Alt+F1-F8 for the rest. Every major window is fullscreen on its own desktop and can thus be switched with one keypress (I like desktops over some sort of window-focus hotkey as it gives me a spatial metaphor to how keys are assigned). For example, I'll bounce between web (F7) or pdf (F6) while editing code (F1/F2), negating the need to have two windows side-by-side with the management/tradeoffs that incurs.
Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
41–50 of 69 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#42I've found that if you set up devilspie and xbindkeys, it doesn't really matter what WM you use.
devilspie is a rules engine for windows--new windows for this application go to this desktop and are always maximized; browser windows always go to workspace 1, all windows are always undecorated, etc.
xbindkeys is a scheme app that just handles mapping key bindings to shell commands.
Both of these are configured with files full of s-expression that you can check into your version control. Put them together and you can kinda ignore the fact that you're still using brain-dead metacity.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#43ratpoison, because it actually manages those pesky windows.
I use ratpoison on a ThinkPad X201. I basically only have one xterm with tmux and one browser open. Ratpoison is the least annoying window manager for that.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#44I am using dwm with the bottomstack, gridmode and pertag patches and my own modifications.
Currently I am using a notebook in front of an external display and I added a function to dwm with which I can essentially "push" all clients (windows) to the external display, which in turn sends all its clients to my notebook's display (or in other words it swaps all clients of one display with all clients of the other).
When I am coding I am always using bstack mode with vim on top and one or two terminals at the bottom. The external monitor is displaying documentation. If I have to look something up I just have to push vim + terminals away. If I am finished I pull them back. So my notebook display becomes my working display.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#45I 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.
I didn't even realize awesome wasn't in the Arch Linux repositories any more. I installed it from there a month ago.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#46Xmonad, 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
I'll third a vote for Xmonad. To be honest though, I consider it a failure if I find myself interacting with X Windows at all.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#47I 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…
Another vote for Awesome WM. Like you, it was my first (and, so far, only) foray into tiling WMs, and I'm using it on dual 21" monitors.
I usually have Chrome on my right screen, several tabs worth of terminals on my left screen, and Komodo Edit will float back and forth between the two, depending on what I'm doing.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#48I am using dwm with the bottomstack, gridmode and pertag patches and my own modifications. Currently I am using a notebook in front of an external display and I added a function to dwm with which I can essentially "push" all clients (windows) to the external display, which in turn sends all its clients to my notebook's display (or in other words it swaps all clients of one display with all clients of the other). When…
I find that dwm always gets dismissed by users of awesome or xmonad. I've run all three for long periods of time and always go back to dwm, most likely due to my hatred of "bloat". It's stable, small (28kb binary), fun to hack and nice and snappy.
http://suckless.org has some other really cool stuff as well.
ii is a FIFO based IRC client, slock, wmii etc...
http://hg.suckless.org/ is their HG repo.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?
#49I'm sad to see so little love for ion and ratpoison. Ion2 ftw.