LINUX MOUSELESS WINDOW MANAGER FULL
LINUX MOUSELESS WINDOW MANAGER WINDOWS

I want to use the same general interface (wm, editor, vcs, etc.) on all my computers, though, and I ran into problems with old ports of GHC on some hardware platforms. Xmonad: I liked this one quite a bit, but I didn't know Haskell at the time. I stopped using it because it integrates very poorly with some programs (e.g. Stable, easy to configure / script, and I was happy to go mouseless after using blackbox for several years. Ratpoison: I picked it up very quickly, since I've been using screen for almost a decade. I've used dwm, wmii, xmonad, and ratpoison for several months each. Whichever you choose, there's a fair chance it'll be incredibly frustrating at first. Here's some info with notes on pretty much every X window manager ever. I keep meaning to give awesome a fair shot now that 3's out. Let me stress that I've been impressed by xmonad, wmii and awesome - I'm talking so much about ratpoison because it's what I know. Here's a collection of Ratpoison scripts that give a good idea of what's possible. (It's been a couple of years since I've tried some of these, so I'll happily accept corrections if any of the above has been outdated.) Awesome 3 is halfway there - you can perform arbitrary extension in Lua, and it offers an awesome-client command that lets you issue commands to the WM, but not to solicit info from it. Wmii's plan9 interface makes it as open to scripting as ratpoison ruby-wmii runs with that. You can extend xmonad in any language you want, as long as it's Haskell, likewise Ion3 and Lua. Ratpoison is easy to hack, given that you can issue all WM commands and solicit all WM information with 'ratpoison -c', so you can write scripts to drive it in whatever language you want. The apps respond, but Ratpoison doesn't interpret or act on these events, or change which frame has focus (unless the app asks the WM for focus in response to your action.) So you can be manipulating one app with the mouse while another still has keyboard focus. Ratpoison is mouse-agnostic to a fault - if you have multiple frames on your screen, move the mouse pointer and click all you want. I've heard people say the exact opposite. I've gotten used to ratpoison's approach, and the modkey approach annoys me. Most of the others want you to allocate a modkey to it, and everything is done by chording with that modkey. (Here's a way to deal with the GIMP as 31d1 notes, the default behavior with the GIMP or other multi-window apps isn't that useful.)Īnother difference is that ratpoison is driven by one or more escape keys. But if you want the dynamic tiling of the others, you'd do better with one of them.

LINUX MOUSELESS WINDOW MANAGER WINDOWS

You can split the screen and resize the windows manually as you see fit with hooks and scripts, you could cajole tiling behavior out of it (and many ratpoison users have such set up for specific applications or combinations of applications).

Ratpoison differs from the others you list in that it's centered around offering one giant window at a time instead of around tiling. (As such, so much as a status bar seems like too much eye candy for me.)

Posted by 31d1 at 3:29 PM on Octoīest answer: I'm a longtime ratpoison user. Also, Haskell is pretty cool and learning about it is good brain food. But I have a hard time imagining it can beat xmonad. If you're into Lisp, it couldn't hurt to look at stumpwm. wmii has some issues that awesome addresses fairly well, and ratpoison, the OG tiling wm fails it at the classic problem of tiling wm's, badly behaved apps like Gimp. That said, if you can't hang with xmonad, or are not inclined, awesome is definitely the next best. With a bit of thought, I managed to get a good config without knowing any Haskell (and it is a weird experience to kind of look at other things and guess how you're supposed to say a thing, and have it workmost of the time!), and a few questions in #xmonad helped me understand some of the more cryptic aspects of the language. It also has great documentation - once you figure out wtf it is saying - but it does trick you into writing Haskell, as the wm itself is a bunch of libraries, and your config file actually compiles to the window manager.

LINUX MOUSELESS WINDOW MANAGER FULL

It works better than the others with weird apps and situations, has amazing contrib extensions, like Xmonad.Prompt and Xmonad.Scratchpad, even integrates beautifully and easily with gnome if you want it to, and is perhaps the only one that has a fantastic and friendly community around it (freenode/#xmonad is full of helpful and friendly people that are happy to handhold noobs). Best answer: I've messed with all the ones you've listed except for ion, and despite the barrier to entry xmonad is by far the best.

Linux mouseless window manager