dwm
dwm.suckless.org
dwm
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Re: dwm
#2> Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it's pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist.
This is the zen of suckless. Unlike other projects that desperately reach for users anywhere they can get them and then suffer the resulting bloat, suckless knows exactly who they are building for.
It’s a tough thing to swallow but embracing the opposite of the suckless zen is probably a large part of why modern software is so bad. The more we try to pretend it should be possible for all people to program or use computers in general, the worse software becomes.
Re: dwm
#3Before you even ask: yes, there's a port for Wayland: https://github.com/djpohly/dwl
Re: dwm
#4The zen of dwm is endlessly browsing this list of patches and eventually adding so many that any new patches cause merge errors that take a long time to untangle: https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/
Re: dwm
#5> Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it's pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. This is the zen of suckless. Unlike other projects that desperately reach for users anywhere they can get them and then suffer the resulting bloat, suckless knows exactly who they are building for. It’s a tough thing to swallow but embracing the opposite of the suckless…
There's a middle ground though.
I think most people would consider OpenBSD for instance to be "small." It comes packed full of tools, many of which you might never use. Many things come with "user friendly" config formats. I don't think anyone in their right mind would call it bloated (as far as reasonably modern unixalikes are concerned), but it's also far from being so minimalistic as to require you to configure things at source level.
And in OpenBSD, you find this window manager called cwm. It's not exactly comparable; hardcore dwm users would no doubt be very disappointed with it. However, I use both WMs and both suck & are good in their own ways. cwm has a config format and you don't need a compiler and the entire toolchain to be able to configure it. On the other hand, you don't have all the useful patches people have made for dwm over the years. cwm is small, and not bloated.
Re: dwm
#6> Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it's pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. This is the zen of suckless. Unlike other projects that desperately reach for users anywhere they can get them and then suffer the resulting bloat, suckless knows exactly who they are building for. It’s a tough thing to swallow but embracing the opposite of the suckless…
userbases ideally drive investment into software too
the scope of suckless software will always be rather limited. one of the reasons their distro failed. but judging by how their elitism is not just tongue in cheek, most of them likely run LFS anyway. they seem like the kind of people that look at gentoo and decide that's not enough micromanagement for them.
Re: dwm
#7> Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it's pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. This is the zen of suckless. Unlike other projects that desperately reach for users anywhere they can get them and then suffer the resulting bloat, suckless knows exactly who they are building for. It’s a tough thing to swallow but embracing the opposite of the suckless…
> The more we try to pretend it should be possible for all people to program or use computers in general, the worse software becomes.
I was 100% with you until that last sentence. For me, it's just an important reminder that software isn't just a commercial endeavor, or just a job, but can be artistry, hobby, and tool. And that each of those are vibrant enough to support and serve their own overlapping communities.
I definitely miss the heart and aesthetics of software some days, so I get the cynism!
Signed - dmenu fan
Re: dwm
#8just use bspwm!
Re: dwm
#9> Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it's pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. This is the zen of suckless. Unlike other projects that desperately reach for users anywhere they can get them and then suffer the resulting bloat, suckless knows exactly who they are building for. It’s a tough thing to swallow but embracing the opposite of the suckless…
There are options between those opposites, though. Here's my preferred point[1] in the space of possibilities:
It's impossible for all people to effectively use software over the long term without learning about its internals. Software can help people learn about its internals.
Re: dwm
#10I've used dwm as my window manager for a couple years now, after switching from i3, and have never looked back (i3 was fine, but it had a bug that was affecting me too often--I don't even remember what now).
For me, the killer feature (aside from tiling vs overlapping) is that on my three monitors, I can switch virtual desktops independently on each monitor. After being able to do this, I don't understand why every window manager doesn't offer this. It's not uncommon with tiling WMs that have good multi-monitor support, but you really can't find it in traditional WMs. There's an unmaintained patch of openbox--openbox-multihead--that added the feature, and there's an "experimental" hybrid window manager written in Go (by the same author of the openbox patch), but no mainstream window managers appear to have the feature. Apparently it goes against a requirement/assumption in the EWMH spec and breaks existing pagers. But that's okay, because I don't use a pager.
Anyway, it really is critical to how I work now. I can keep a set of windows on my right monitor, and flip between virtual desktops on my center monitor without the right monitor changing at all. (And no, using the "sticky" feature of other WMs doesn't work for me because sometimes I do want to flip to a different virtual desktop on the right monitor and have that set of windows for whatever context I'm switching to). Along the same lines, the pertag patch is part of making dwm the perfect windows manager for me.
(If you're interested in the particular set of patches I use and my config, I maintain it at https://github.com/racingmars/dwm)