While I’m not rushing off to uninstall Gnome just yet, I’m thinking it’s only a matter of time. I’ll definitely be sticking with DWM for a while.
You’ll also find that they’re somewhat reminiscent of Vim - mod1+h, j, k, l invocation is present. One last bit of praise - DWM has a man page in which no user of this WM will want to go without reading, as it provides extraordinarily useful shortcuts which you will use on a regular basis. It’s an application launcher that will make Gnome-do users feel right at home.
Dmenu is another piece of software made by suckless meant to complement DWM. Programs are defined in the config as associated with these tags so that they’re always opening where you expect them. The WM makes gratuitous usage of what it calls tags. xinitrc, you can recompile and reinstall DWM, use the default shift+mod1+q to kill the WM, and it immediately pops back with all your programs still running. By executing dwm in an infinite loop via. It runs. A recompile is required when changing the config, but it can be done seamlessly.
a quick check with `du -sh` in the build directory revealed something beautiful: The source code, dump files, compiled code, and the ready to install package comprised less than 400kb. Was I missing a file? An entire directory? There were no errors. The codebase and config are both C, and who doesn’t have gcc installed on a Linux box? After gleefully compiling and building a package for DWM (which took less than 10 seconds), I was wondering if it would even work. This WM is about as basic as it gets, but it quickly grows on you. I had seen oh-so pretty snapshots of users’ desktops in the monthly screenshot thread. Or as I would like to call it, Damn! Win Much? In addition to uncovering this via Awesome, I had also read briefly about DWM by way of the Arch Linux forums.
It was here that I had my first introduction to a tiler called DWM, which Awesome is a fork of.ĭWM: Dynamic Window Manager by. I’m not sure I want to be forced into rewriting just to get access to new features and bug fixes. Writing a proper config for a tiling WM can be tedious the first time. Many users have left Awesome frustrated because of the tendency of the author to change the entire configuration format on a new release. The downside is that the author of Awesome doesn’t live up to his own WM. They bind with outside programs to give you features such as keybindings, popup notifications, and widgets. Awesome comes with several helper libraries to improve your experience, colorfully named such as: awful, beautiful, wicked, and naughty. However, because its interpreted, it can be a little less responsive than a window manager based on a compiled language. The source and config is written in Lua - a language I’m very familiar with after writing addons for World of Warcraft for a year.
I found it to be somewhat full featured for the lightweight world of tilers. A Haskell programmer would be more than at home here.ĪwesomeWM: This tiler is, as you might expect, completely awesome. This isn’t to say that I’m discounting Xmonad as a window manager. Given the Haskell overhead requirement and my lack of interest in learning the language, I quickly moved on. Addons such as Xmobar exist to give you a launcher and panel interface, making the environment more immediately informative. Any changes require a recompile of the source code, as the config is essentially a header file, but this can be done on the fly and isn’t that unfriendly of a process. The config is, of course, also based in Haskell. Xmonad: Fairly lightweight, but being based entirely in Haskell, ends up being a fairly large investment if you’re not already using other Haskell programs. Why am I bothering with this now seemingly archaic mouse-centric interface when I’m constantly using the keyboard? My GUI should complement this! I browsed around looking at various tiling window managers which were purported to be more keyboard friendly. Gnome-Do, a fantastic application launcher, essentially was relegated as a launcher to urxvt. Then it hit me. My music player of choice is ncmpcpp - an ncurses based front end to MPD, and I use irssi for IRC. I’m proud to say that I’m 100% sold on Vim as a fully functional text editor with just about every feature I could ever want. As my Linux skills have developed, I’ve found myself increasingly using the terminal. I tinkered with KDE and XFCE, but they never seemed to behave as cleanly as Gnome. Gnome has been my DE for quite some time now.
Converts from Windows will appreciate the similar look and feel of a task bar, mouse behavior, and floating window layout thanks to Compiz or Metacity. It provides many of the features a user needs on a daily basis, and then some.