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dwm

dwm.suckless.org

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Re: dwm

#11

Post by woodruffw »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #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…

Elitist (and not elite) is correct: my experience as an observer in the *nix "ricing" community is that there's a weak negative correlation between obsessive suckless tool use and programming competency. "Fetishistic" users are over-represented in suckless's userbase.

Source: dmenu user.

Re: dwm

#12

Post by kriops »

jchassoul wrote: post #8

just use bspwm!

dwm is not my daily driver, but it’s incredibly easy to be productive with the default config – it’s my go-to on my distro of choice (Fedora) on machines that aren’t both mine and intended for long-term use.

bspwm is somewhat more painful to install and configure in my experience (though also great once it’s set up), and afaik it does not have an easy config for the right-side window stack that is a key selling point of dwm to me.

Re: dwm

#13

Post by sbysb »

racingmars wrote: post #10

I'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 w…

This is something I have come to realize I unconsciously have gotten very dependent on - MacOS let's you swap virtual desktops for the monitor you are currently focused on without swapping any of the others. I never realized how intuitive this is until switching back to my XFCE linux installation and getting very frustrated with virtual desktops entirely. I might have to give dwm a try again on my linux machine if it supports this.

Re: dwm

#14

Post by HellsMaddy »

racingmars wrote: post #10

I'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 w…

What’s a pager in the context of a window manager? I’m aware of CLI pagers like less but I’ve never heard the term used with WMs.

Re: dwm

#15

Post by mcbuilder »

jchassoul wrote: post #8

just use bspwm!

I would say you use DWM for the suckless philosophy of it at this point, but it is historically important as one of the major early tiling window managers during this current wave that starting around the late naugties. deserves some recognition. It a bit later that bspwm was written, and now it has gained some traction in the "ricing" community. DWM was sort of a default choice for the minimal tiling WM. However, it wasn't for me, I used Subtle for its features and than XMonad for the Haskell experience.

Now I've actually settled into enjoying EXWM the most, feels very natural to have everything to at least appear to be inside emacs. My point is that there is no right tiling window manager.

Re: dwm

#16

Post by linkdd »

racingmars wrote: post #10

I'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 w…

> It's not uncommon with tiling WMs that have good multi-monitor support, but you really can't find it in traditional WMs

That's because this feature is not a Freedesktop standard. The X11 root window have a property _NET_NUMBER_OF_DESKTOPS and a few more[0] to help implement this behavior.

Most tiling WMs choose to ignore this standard in favor of this great feature. But the WMs of Gnome, Xfce, KDE, etc... will probably never implement it just in case some apps don't support it (like some games that needs to be floating windows in tiling WMs).

  [0] - https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/1.3/ar01s03.html

Re: dwm

#18

Post by racingmars »

HellsMaddy wrote: post #14
racingmars wrote: post #10

I'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 w…

What’s a pager in the context of a window manager? I’m aware of CLI pagers like less but I’ve never heard the term used with WMs.

It's the little desktop "preview boxes," I guess you'd call them, that you can click on to switch between virtual desktops. Usually running in the taskbar in most desktop environments.

Re: dwm

#19

Post by ghostpepper »

racingmars wrote: post #10

I'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 w…

I use both i3 (actually Sway) and MacOS on a daily basis and they both support this feature. I agree I could not live without it.

I have never used dwm seriously, but as far as I can tell the main feature it offers over i3 is tagging. I don't really understand how this meaningfully changes the day to day workflow, and I'd love to hear what you consider to be the advantages.

Re: dwm

#20

Post by racingmars »

sbysb wrote: post #13
racingmars wrote: post #10

I'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 w…

This is something I have come to realize I unconsciously have gotten very dependent on - MacOS let's you swap virtual desktops for the monitor you are currently focused on without swapping any of the others. I never realized how intuitive this is until switching back to my XFCE linux installation and getting very frustrated with virtual desktops entirely. I might have to give dwm a try again on my linux machine if it…

Yes! Before I went all-in on desktop Linux, I was a Mac user, and MacOS definitely got virtual desktops exactly right in this regard.
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