“Spending too much time organising your windows instead of getting things done? Tiling window managers aim to handle the layout for you. In this article, I’ll show how to configure Ion 3 to work with ROX. The basic idea of a tiling window manager is to use all of the screen space for windows, without gaps or overlapping. So, if you have two windows side-by-side and you make one of them a bit bigger, the other one shrinks to make room. I often have several source files open, plus a couple of terminals and maybe a log viewer, so I started looking for something to make things a bit slicker.”
of the both of you that use tiling/ productivity-oriented window managers, which do you use? wmii? ion? ratpoison? And do you use them exclusively (i.e. I use wmii when I wanna ‘get things done’, but that isn’t most of the time)? *goes and plays with the cube*
There’s also stumpwm that is basically ratpoison rewritten in Common Lisp to make it more customizable.
http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/
http://stumpwm.antidesktop.net/cgi-bin/wiki
this stumpwm reminds me of a similar project i saw a few years ago. it was gwm for generic window manager i think. ofcourse it was finished by the time i saw it .
it has a custom language called wool. every thing done in lisp.
http://koala.ilog.fr/gwm/
but apart from both being in lisp the commonality ends there. gwm is too flexible and too powerful.
> but apart from both being in lisp the commonality
> ends there. gwm is too flexible and too powerful.
Funny, people say the same thing about lisp
Don’t know about the other guy, but I use ion exclusively. I find it much more productive than gnome, it very much annoys me know to have to manually resize windows.
Moving and resizing windows manually? What a waste of time! Isn’t that what a ‘window manager’ is for after all?
have you tried xmonad?
[ http://www.xmonad.org/ ]
how does it stack up against these?
i have just started learning Haskell, so im quite curious to know how users of other tiling wms rate xmonad. i had used wmii for a day a few months back, but didn’t feel comfortable so left it alone
thanks
-Ram
The difference with the mercurial version of wmii is noticeable, so you might want to check that out (I mean, there really isn’t THAT much room for differentiation in the world of tiling wms, but if I get a chance to check out xmonad, I will). Just looking at the homepage tho, I think one ‘cool’ feature in wmii that xmonad lacks is the tagging approach to virtual desktops (where windows can have multiple tags, and thus show up in multiple views). It focuses a lot around plan9 concepts (“everything is a file”) so it’s easy to script/ work with (note: ubuntu has no plan9port package, so you can’t get everything out of wmii).
“””
Spending too much time organising your windows instead of getting things done?
“””
No. Next question?
It’s interesting, and from a usability standpoint I’m sure it’s great. I can’t argue against it. But esthetically I just don’t like it.
I wish more ‘normal’ window managers would add this kind of tiling as an option. I’ve tried using several of these tiling window managers and on the whole I like them, but I keep finding myself in situations where I wish I could move windows around normally. What would be really cool would be if KDE or Gnome would allow you to chose between tiling and normal window handling on a desktop by desktop basis.
Imho, ion3 blows away wmii. Wmii is trying to have as little as code as possible. This is a nice idea, but in the end, we won’t notice the difference. Infact, in the default setup, wmii is considerably slower since its using an event loop in a bash script. To be fair, this is an awesome feature, since it doesn’t matter what language you write your event loop in as long as it has plan9 apis. Doing so, you can fix the “lag” of the default bash event loop. It also can’t split the screen in the same way as ion, or have tabbed views inside screen segments (really nice). Wmii’s tagging feature is awesome though.
And, ion3 does allow you to switch. I run gimp in it’s own screen in floating mode and it works just fine. That’s pretty much the only program I use that I really “need” non-tiled windows…and even that I could do if I had too.
Also, I seem to be drawn to projects with total jerks for authors (OpenBSD, ion, wmii, GNU arch). I’m not sure why that is, but it makes reading the mailing lists painful at times.
Tiled window managers aren’t for everyone.
Edit: Just because you don’t think you waste time messing with your windows doesn’t mean it’s a solution looking for a problem.
Also, I don’t mean to sound down on wmii. It’s really well written and a great showcase of how awesome the plan9 way of doing things can be.
Edited 2007-07-10 15:30
“It also can’t split the screen in the same way as ion, or have tabbed views inside screen segments (really nice).”
tabbing was replaced with ‘stacking’ as a design decision, I guess it’s a matter of preference (see this link: http://i14.tinypic.com/6g35mq8.png ). Also, by ‘how it splits the screen’, do you mean how windows can span multiple ‘columns’?
> tabbing was replaced with ‘stacking’ as a design
> decision, I guess it’s a matter of preference (see
> this link: http://i14.tinypic.com/6g35mq8.png ).
Yeah, I hate it. You have to look at both the top and the bottom of the screen to see whats in the stack. Probably not much different than looking left or right, but imho, stuff like that should be at the top of a window, not possibly on the bottom or possibly on the top.
> Also, by ‘how it splits the screen’, do you mean how
> windows can span multiple ‘columns’?
Yeah, I think that was it. I found the same thing, then saw a mailing list post on it. Can’t find it right now for some reason.