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

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

#61

Post by cnvogel »

staunch wrote: post #7

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 (…

I also used Windowmaker for a really long time, but stopped when a few years ago it was incompatible with a few of the applications I use (e.g. gaim (now pidgin) would crash very often, and some more annoyances I forgot about).

I especially liked docking applications/icons, its good support for virtual desktops and especially the many wmXXX applications that did one job well, in the space of a 64x64 pixel tile.

These days, I mostly resort to the "standard" gnome desktop with whatever it uses and resort to something very lightweight such as fluxbox on resource constrained machines.

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

#62

Post by mindslight »

kroger wrote: post #53
mindslight wrote: post #41

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 exa…

I can have 36 desktops with the gnome in ubuntu 10.04 (not that I do, I just use 6 ;-)

Sure... however last time I checked, you can only assign hotkeys to 12 of them.

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

#63

Post by mtmcannon »

enduser wrote: post #8

I 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 used to love wmii, but I use xmonad now for the better multi-head support. I wish xmonad did tags like wmii though.

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

#65

Post by sunkencity »

enduser wrote: post #8

I 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 love wmii but it's a pity it's such a pita to build the plan9 stuff on osx. I prefer dwm that way - no pesky dependencies

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

#67

Post by kroger »

mindslight wrote: post #62
kroger wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can have 36 desktops with the gnome in ubuntu 10.04 (not that I do, I just use 6 ;-)

Sure... however last time I checked, you can only assign hotkeys to 12 of them.

Hum, you're probably right. A hack would be to use something like wmctrl and custom hotkeys.

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

#69

Post by SiFTW »

mquander wrote: 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…

I use awesome, it's ... awesome. Try and get away from any floating windows at all, when it's set up correctly there's no need. Also get away from the mouse if you can, mouse free working with Awesome WM is where it shines. shameless plug If anyone's interested in a guide to getting Awesome WM installed and set up with Ubuntu I made one here. http://8bit.co/?p=39
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