Changing window managers
Well after what must be nigh on ten years of almost zero change I’m finally changing from using fvwm2 as my window manager. I hate and loath “desktops” since I want windows using up my valuable screen estate and don’t see the point of hiding icons underneath. Most of my work is either at the command line or xterms (mutt for email. screen/irssi for IRC). Normally I have three small xterms arranged vertically on the left hand side with the right side of the screen devoted to firefox.
I was getting frustrated with the way fvwm seems to lock out all other X activity on window movement/placement/draging. The final straw was when it didn’t seem to play nicely with amarok (when you click “close” it’s suppose to go to gnome-panel notification area but it didn’t.
First up was looking at http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/“>ion and http://wmii.de/“>wmii which are keyboard driven window managers. I like the idea of window managers manging windows rather than you having to do all the work. However I could not get on with them - they didn’t seem to give the the flexibility that I wanted in the way I wanted it. Namely I want to say which windows are whereabouts. I would appreciate some help - perhaps when I move one window it could (optionally) resize another window to make room for the first one. Hell, maybe I should patent that idea before some evil monopolistic company tries to do so 
I then looked at fluxbox but wasn’t taken with it at all.
Finally only sawfish. Promising - moving windows etc doesn’t affect anything else, a couple of nice themes (microGUI looks nice but I don’t like the “close” button being so close to the other buttons), so “Cruz” wins the day.
A few modifications so far:
- close button just does close (or destroy with right mouse button)
- “shade” button (top right) does window menu (left button) or shade (right button)
I still need to get the menus sorted out. I had a nice system on fvwm with common apps and xterm at the top which meant that by clicking and letting go I got a new xterm, but by clicking and holding the mouse button down I got other options.
I also need to investigate http://sawfish.endorphin.org/SawfishWiki/SawfishWikiLibrary“>SawfishWikiLibrary for cool plugins.
Posted: January 18th, 2006 under Linux.
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