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If you use tiled window managers, and haven't used Xmonad before, I highly recommend it. It's very lightweight, fast, non-buggy, and has a perfect (for me at least) little feature set.
Have you used ion or awesome? How is xmonad compared to those?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many kudos to dons for creating an awesome twm, but I don't think it's a good investment of time for the HN userbase (i.e., the young start-ups who just want to get their thing working and up, whatever be that 'thing'). Xmonad is hard to configure and set up, and hard to work with. I'd rather stick with gnome and have everything Just Work. But, that's just my opinion.
Many kudos to Linux for creating an awesome DOS 6.2, but I don't think it's a good investment of time for the HN userbase. Linux is hard to configure and set up, and hard to work with. I'd rather stick with Windows and have everything Just Work. Yeah, this comment is kind of like that. Most "modern" windowmanagers are much more about making the desktop pretty than making it usable. Me, I'm happily still running fvwm2…
If you use tiled window managers, and haven't used Xmonad before, I highly recommend it. It's very lightweight, fast, non-buggy, and has a perfect (for me at least) little feature set.
Have you used ion or awesome? How is xmonad compared to those?
As I remember it, with ion you basically created your own layout manually. You'd make horizontal or vertical splits to divide up your workspace and then manually move windows around in to the resulting frames. It worked brilliantly: with a few keystrokes you could get exactly the windows you wanted in the order you wanted.
xmonad manages the layout for you, you don't have to do it manually. This means that when you create a new window xmonad automatically creates a new frame for it. To contrast, ion would add the window as a new tab of the current frame. If you wanted a new frame in ion then you'd have to create it.
The automatic layouts of xmonad are what make it so interesting, but you do need to spend some time getting them set up for the way you work. xmonad is without a doubt the most customisable window manager ever (which is both a blessing and a curse).
xmonad also works much better with other software than ion. This is a reflection of the developers behind each window manager. The ion developer had very strong opinions about everything and told anything he didn't like (like anti-aliased fonts, automake, GNOME, etc.) to f'ck off. The xmonad team are super-friendly and play well with others. xmonad has great GNOME support, for example.
I think I still prefer ion's way of working, but I strongly suspect that it's possible to duplicate it in xmonad, I just haven't done it yet. Maybe now that 0.9 is out I'll review my xmonad configuration.
If you use tiled window managers, and haven't used Xmonad before, I highly recommend it. It's very lightweight, fast, non-buggy, and has a perfect (for me at least) little feature set.
Have you used ion or awesome? How is xmonad compared to those?
I've used Xmonad for a few weeks now and it is simply great: "screen real estate" is never wasted, you get free brain cycles by never doing the nitty-gritty details of window arrangement manually again - you switch high level "layout algorithms" instead that arrange your windows differently. Are you (like me) an Emacs user? You want to remap the Xmonad modifier-key (default is on left Alt a.k.a. Meta). Here is my sol…
Xmonad is awesome. I run it (with urxvtd) inside X11.app as a terminal/iterm + tmux/screen replacement.
1. They mention "Gnome compatibility" and "KDE compatibility" on their page. Why? I thought this window manager is supposed to be used instead of gnome/KDE, no?
2. On some screenshots you can clearly see overlapping windows, i.e. not all of them are always tiled?
Thanks!