Ask HN: Which Tiling Window Manager do you use? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Which Tiling Window Manager do you use?

#11

Post by frigg » Tue, Feb 04, 2014, 1:52 PM UTC

It depends on what you'd like I suppose. If you want highly a configurable WM then xmonad is great (I can't speak for the rest). If you want something very simple with limited configuration but which allows you to quickly use it then scrotwm.

You can find a lot of configs for xmonad/awesome/otherwm on github which you can then copy and adapt to your liking.

Re: Ask HN: Which Tiling Window Manager do you use?

#12

Post by juliangoldsmith » Tue, Feb 04, 2014, 2:54 PM UTC

asb wrote: post #9

I'm using dwm with the flextile and systray patches.

+1 for dwm. It's <2k lines, so it's easy to modify, and it's really simple, so it's easy to get started with.

Re: Ask HN: Which Tiling Window Manager do you use?

#13

Post by stevekemp » Tue, Feb 04, 2014, 3:07 PM UTC

I use bluetile, as it is a middle-ground between the default GNOME window-manager and a full tiling experience.

As things stand I'm not likely to change any-time soon, because it does work the way I'd expect it to.

Re: Ask HN: Which Tiling Window Manager do you use?

#14

Post by meerita » Tue, Feb 04, 2014, 3:33 PM UTC

SizeUp on Mac OS X.

Re: Ask HN: Which Tiling Window Manager do you use?

#15

Post by sdegutis » Tue, Feb 04, 2014, 5:14 PM UTC

I wrote Zephyros[1] for Mac OS X, which is scriptable in pretty much any language, and used that for a while.

Eventually my OCD kicked in about the performance of Zephyros's server/client architecture on my laptop, so I forked it as Phoenix[2], which is only scriptable via an embedded JavaScript VM. Now I use Phoenix exclusively.

Here's my current tiling config[3] for Phoenix.

But I'm currently trying to make the transition from Mac OS X to Windows 8. So I plan to port Phoenix to Windows, and I'm naming it ZephSharp[4] (I'm terrible at naming things). It's going to be written in C#, which fortunately has ClojureCLR, so Clojure will be its scripting language instead of JavaScript (hoorah!).

[1]: https://github.com/sdegutis/zephyros

[2]: https://github.com/sdegutis/phoenix

[3]: https://gist.github.com/sdegutis/7756583

[4]: https://github.com/sdegutis/zephsharp -- Nota bene, it's not even close to working, I've only spent a few hours prototyping some basic hard-coded stuff, so beware!

Re: Ask HN: Which Tiling Window Manager do you use?

#16

Post by mjn » Tue, Feb 04, 2014, 9:32 PM UTC

iends wrote: post #7

tbrock wrote: post #6

I tend to like i3. But all the cool kids on arch are using herbstluft. To me, Haskell and Lua are turn-offs so xmonad and awesome are out. I don't want to have to learn a programming language to configure my window manager. Straight up well documented C and old school configuration files are the way to go. Plus the tutorial/intro video gets you going quickly.

I've never heard of herbstluft. What makes all the cool arch kids drawn to it? (the fact I've never heard of it?)

One thing that's interestingly unixy about it is that all configuration/interaction is done via a CLI program, herbstclient, which interacts with herbstserver, rather than via config files or an embedded scripting language. So config and scripting is then typically done via a bash script, or whatever other way you prefer to call a series of herbstclient commands.

Otherwise its UI model is fairly typical for "manual" (i.e. not auto-layout) tiling WMs.

Re: Ask HN: Which Tiling Window Manager do you use?

#17

Post by brotchie » Wed, Feb 05, 2014, 2:12 AM UTC

Heavily use xmonad.

I have a single xmobar on my primary screen showing active workspaces, max cpu using process, max memory using process, cpu usage / throttling and network traffic.

I do a lot of work across multiple VMs (OSX on vmware, multiple Windows boxes on virtualbox). Having OSX running XCode full screen on one workspace, Windows 7 running Visual Studio full screen on another, Android Eclipse open on another workspace, and Vim open editing some back end server code on another workspace is invaluable.

    Meta-V Start Fullscreen Windows VM
    Meta-O Start Fullscreen OSX
    Meta-C Start Google Chrome
    Meta-E Start Android Eclipse
    Alt-Shift-Return Start Gnome terminal
    Alt-Shift-N Start a new Gnome terminal in the current Gnome terminal's working directory

Re: Ask HN: Which Tiling Window Manager do you use?

#18

Post by bgar » Wed, Feb 05, 2014, 4:01 AM UTC

I've tried xmonad, awesome, i3, dwm, herbsluftwm, ratpoison, etc. My favorite was dwm for a few years, then I moved up to i3 because of multi-monitor support. I see i3 as a good medium between the really minimal <2k lines tiling managers and the larger ones like awesomewm.

Re: Ask HN: Which Tiling Window Manager do you use?

#19

Post by dmm » Wed, Feb 05, 2014, 4:55 AM UTC

stumpwm. It's the sequel to ratpoison, implemented in common lisp. You can hack while it's running. The multi-monitor support is top notch. http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/

Re: Ask HN: Which Tiling Window Manager do you use?

#20

Post by exelib » Wed, Feb 05, 2014, 4:36 PM UTC

I use awesome from 2008. It's doing just two thing: order windows and start console. But it's exactly what I need.