rethinking the window manager [LWN.net]

rethinking the window manager

Posted Dec 19, 2006 10:31 UTC (Tue) by djabsolut (guest, #12799)
In reply to: rethinking the window manager by wookey
Parent article: KDE 4: the ultimate business desktop? (Computerworld)

It'd be nice to see KDE move beyond being a "clone" of MS Windows and into leading the user interface area. The window manager described above sounds like a neat idea. I would certainly be willing to give it a try if there was such an option within KDE.

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rethinking the window manager

Posted Dec 19, 2006 13:08 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

As long as ion conforms to the ICCCM and EWMH specs, you should be able to use it with KDE already (export KDEWM= your WM of choice, or a small shell script that execs it with whatever parameters you desire, and then run startkde).

Of course, the one-window-at-a-time wms might find panels and the like rather hard to implement. (This is the major reason why I, as a one-window-at-a-time man, have never tried the one-window-at-a-time wms: because I have a couple of panels, a couple of dynamically-raisable procmeters, and a daliclock ticking away around the edges of that One Window...)

rethinking the window manager

Posted Dec 21, 2006 3:46 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

When I get tired of Gnome I'll go back to Ratpoison until I get tired of that.

I like ratpoison for my laptop. It doesn't have a very high resolution and I find trackpads abhorent so it works out nicely. Also it's nice if I want to concentrate on one task as it helps to avoid distraction.

Plus it's a Apple laptop so the look of dismay on OS X user's faces is pretty nice.

It's lightweight, but I don't use it because of that. (I start up beagle, and dbus and gnome session in the background. The thing has over a gig of ram in it and I hover at about 30% usage at full tilt in Gnome with having the browser open for days)

The solution for having the little time and monitoring is to whip up a little script to output the information you want with a key combo.

The solution to multiple window applications, like gimp, is to write a small script to launch a xnest full screen with that application running in it. Pretty simple stuff.

At one point to amuse myself I had KDE running in one window. Gnome in another, and OS X running on Mac-on-Linux in another. I was doing the 'Parrellels' thing before parrellels.

I tried looking at ion and such, but I never realy caught on. Ratpoison is easy because I use screen all the time and it's pretty much the same thing, but for X, so the concept is easy to grasp.