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dwm

dwm.suckless.org

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Re: dwm

#51

Post by csande17 »

2c2c2c wrote: post #35
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…

there's something especially annoying about building the worst performing terminal ( https://danluu.com/term-latency/ ) while having 5% of features and proclaiming everyone else's software sucks

That particular benchmark is running st on macOS using Apple's XQuartz emulation layer. That's naturally a lot slower than running st on the operating system it was written for (see the "linux-st" line on the chart). And if I'm reading the table in that post correctly, st still used one-tenth the memory of any other terminal tested.

But yes, if you use macOS, st is probably not the terminal for you.

Re: dwm

#52

Post by ognarb »

Just in case you thought about using Suckless/dwm:

They’re doing literal torch hikes through southern Germany at their conferences, fighting online against "cultural marxism", and their mail server has the hostname "Wolfsschanze" (see: https://twitter.com/pid_eins/status/1113738766471057408)

Source: https://twitter.com/kuschku/status/1156488420413362177

Re: dwm

#53

Post by generalizations »

justinsaccount wrote: post #41
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 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. If you decide that you want to see two workspaces from your center monitor, can you easily pull up one of them on the right monitor? The only thing I've ever used that lets you do this is xmonad (described in another comment below).

Yup. There's a spot in the default config file to specify a key binding to move the whole virtual desktop to another window.

Re: dwm

#54

Post by sidpatil »

ghostpepper wrote: post #19
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.

> I have never used dwm seriously, but as far as I can tell the main feature it offers over i3 is tagging.

What are you specifically referring to when you say "tagging"?

Re: dwm

#55

Post by saladuh »

ghostpepper wrote: post #19
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.

No, the biggest feature of DWM is dynamic window tiling (pretty sure DWM stands for Dynamic Window Manager). Sway/i3 can be made to kinda dynamically tile with scripts, but it's much less consistent, less powerful, and hardly works. They are manual tilers and they don't try to be dynamic tilers.

Personally I prefer being able to quickly toggle a dynamic window layout based on my current workflow, and switch back to manual tiling when I specifically need to manually tile.

Currently I use Sway too as it's the most mature tiling compositor on Wayland, but once River WM[0], also based on wlroots, matures more I think I will likely make the switch because I often miss dynamic tiling.

[0] https://github.com/riverwm/river

On a side note, I hate how window moving works in Sway/i3. I can hardly ever get windows to move to where I want them to go with keyboard. As a result, I have a bind that enters a 'move' mode that takes the current selected window and moves it to a window that I can select. That, or I just use the mouse to drag the window, which is kinda annoying considering this is a keeb focussed environment.

Re: dwm

#56

Post by csande17 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #50
tomxor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Because dwm is customized through editing its source code > Suckless tools are developed for the needs (and the benefit) of their own developers, and nobody else. Remember that. Just to flip this on it's head a bit (because different perspectives are more illuminating than crude dichotomies). One of the underlying principles they use to justify not supporting external configuration, is minimal code. The absence of…

strong disagree because an artificial codebase size limit doesn't make the codebase more accessible, it makes it worse. Well designed code isn't primarily short, it's readable, modular, extensible and so on. This isn't the case for dwm. Simplest example, to enable extensions in the form of patches you basically have to apply diffs and because everything is just one giant pile of code even applying two entirely unrela…

If you know C, the fact that dwm's code is only ~2000 lines long makes it far more accessible than any other window manager. You can fairly easily read the source code in an afternoon and fit the whole thing in your head, then make whatever changes you want. (I've done it! For what it's worth, the code is pretty well-factored and easy to understand.) You don't have to worry about how any of your changes interact with some complicated configuration system, scripting language binding, or IPC protocol.

If you don't know C, you benefit from your window manager offering things like scripting language bindings. The overall system becomes more complex and harder to debug, but it's easier to do simple things like change the color scheme.

So when dwm says they're "elitist", they mean that they haven't tried to make their window manager cater to people who don't know C. Luckily, there are a lot of other window managers out there that are better suited to those people.

Re: dwm

#57

Post by jovial_cavalier »

fouric wrote: post #32
jovial_cavalier wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Suckless tools are developed for the needs (and the benefit) of their own developers, and nobody else. Remember that. Another way of putting it is: if you can use it, you become a suckless developer :)

Another way of putting that is "you are required to become a developer in order to use the tool." Great for developer community, but not great for the average user (or even the above-average user - say, 98th percentile) who wants to use computers for the purpose for which they were intended (and are amazing at) - labor-saving devices. Heck, even as a developer , I would always rather use a tool that doesn't require m…

>I would always rather use a tool that doesn't require me to learn the internals in order for me to use it at a basic level of proficiency. Wouldn't you?

In general, I agree, but there is a lot to be said for stripping the cruft out of systems that should be simple. Window management is not complicated - the fact that dwm is functional by default at >If your goal is to make software that artificially requires others to invest a lot of needless time and effort in order to use it...

It is not made artificially difficult. It is just not made artificially easy either. The codebase is organized in a way that optimizes reading it and understanding its function. If you have done anything in C before, you will be up and making small modifications within 10-20 minutes.

Despite the tongue-in-cheek celebration of "elitism," people are more than happy to take a look at your code and tell you what you are doing wrong, and getting my dwm desktop to where I want it took about an afternoon, which is not something I can say of i3, GNOME, KDE, etc.

All of that said, the whole point is that it's not for everyone. If you don't like it, don't use it!

Re: dwm

#58

Post by ghostpepper »

sidpatil wrote: post #54
ghostpepper wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I have never used dwm seriously, but as far as I can tell the main feature it offers over i3 is tagging. What are you specifically referring to when you say "tagging"?

I think it was explained to me as the ability to tag certain windows with short descriptors and then assign tags or groups of tags to different displays/layouts/panes. The main reason I haven't tried it because I had already switched to Sway and gotten rid of Xorg entirely.

Re: dwm

#59

Post by CyberRabbi »

kjeetgill wrote: post #7
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…

> 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…

Well my point is that we pretend programming can be easy by allowing people to program in JavaScript, for example. Sure this has resulted in a boon of apps but the downside is that the average quality of these apps is pretty low in terms of performance-oriented usability and probably in terms of bugs as well.

I sometimes use retro computers and marvel at how well the software for those machines runs. The only difference i can guess is that the average developer ability was higher.

Re: dwm

#60

Post by Macha »

skulk wrote: post #4

The 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/

Reminds me of early 00s phpBB MODs (which they allcapped to avoid confusion with moderators). It ended up this horrific syntax (http://web.archive.org/web/20041010114405/http://www.phpbb.c... ) that functioned as both a bbcode forum post for manual instructions that didn't look too out of place for people to manually apply but also parseable for auto installers like easy mod.

Then it turned into this XML file format in 3.0, which was similar in spirit but a more regular language made it less easy to screw up. XSL was used to make the "go edit it yourself" instructions version: http://web.archive.org/web/20160310004103/https://www.phpbb....

It looks like they've finally ported to a real plugin system (https://www.phpbb.com/extensions/), but I had my fill of extend by patching in those days.

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