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Grumpy Editor - lightweight window managers please!Grumpy Editor - lightweight window managers please!Posted Feb 21, 2007 11:11 UTC (Wed) by endecotp (guest, #36428)Parent article: Xfce 4.4: The best lightweight desktop environment (Linux.com)
Having used fvwm2, xfce and blackbox over the last decade I've always been frustrated that none of them seems to have all of the features and non-features that I want. How about a Grumpy Editor review with a nice table of what they all can and can't do? My preferences:
Focus follows mouse.
I don't think this is asking too much, is it?
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Grumpy Editor - lightweight window managers please! Posted Feb 21, 2007 15:19 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] I don't think this is asking too much, is it? You do ask for too much. First you list a pile of non-standard settings, then you ask for "not too many bugs" and "not too much other useless junk". You can not have it this way: either the thing will be highly-configurable and it'll be big, slow and unwieldy (and probably buggy as well) or it'll be small and lean, but... you'll be unable to find all the options you like...
Grumpy Editor - lightweight window managers please! Posted Feb 21, 2007 16:42 UTC (Wed) by cantsin (guest, #4420) [Link] Please let's not confuse window managers and desktop environments. A window manager, in the narrow sense, only decorates, places and resizes X11 windows. (Examples would be aewm, sawfish, evilwm, ratpoison, ion, but also XFCE's xfwm, Gnome's metacity and KDE's kwin). A number of "window managers" stretch that definition by also providing in-process panels, taskbars, docks, or application menus (fvwm, Window Maker, black/flux/openbox, icewm being perhaps the most popular examples). In a desktop environment however, these components run as separate processes. On top of that, a desktop environment also includes graphical file management, typically also desktop icons and last not least graphical setup menus, with configuration changes being effective on the fly as opposed to restarting a wm. The single components of a desktop environment have a consistent look and feel and can interact via drag-and-drop, thanks to a common GUI toolkit and the use of mechanisms/APIs such as those of freedesktop.org.For the end user, the main difference between a WM - even a WM that accomplish more than pure window management - and a DE is that the latter is fully and consistently operable through the GUI, never throwing users back to the command line for standard tasks like file management and desktop configuration. To my knowledge, only KDE, Gnome and XFCE match those criteria of a genuine desktop environment in the Unix-compatible, X11-based free software world. And among those three, XFCE is the only one that restrains itself to being just a desktop, and not a complete middleware layer with, among others, its own component architecture and massive set of DE-specific libraries and demons. So it is more than just a window manager on the one hand. On the other, in comparison to Gnome and KDE, it is very much like Galeon and later Firefox in relation to the older, heavier, integrated Mozilla suite (now Seamonkey). Just like Galeon had the slogan "the web and only the web", XFCE could deservedly claim to be "the desktop and only the desktop". I wouldn't be surprised if what proved to be a winning formula for free software web browsers could also become a success formula for the free software desktop. With version 4.4, XFCE achieves for the desktop what the first stable versions of Galeon and Firefox achieved for web browsing.
Grumpy Editor - lightweight window managers please! Posted Feb 21, 2007 15:39 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Check out OpenBox.
It's EWMH compliant so you can use it to replace metacity or kwin. It follows the BB style, but it's been through a complete rewrite.
I don't know if it will do everything you want.
It probably doesn't do that tabbed thing. And the 'one-window-raises-all-windows' may be the Window Manager just doing what the application wants it to do in order to be compliant.
But it's basic configuration is with ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml
And it's pretty extensive on what you can configure. It's given sane defaults but you can configure what happens when you click on a window's titlebar vs left lower corner vs the body of the window etc etc. It's all context dependant if you want and it can behavor in most any manner you would want.
For launching applications it's pretty simple to do that. One of the interesting features is you can do key combo chaining. So you can setup a 'application launch mode' were you.. say.. hit ctrl-alt-l and then that way you can launch your applications with a single key press.
Personally I just bound gmrun to launch with alt-f2 so I just type out the name of the application I want to use. Supports tab completion and will cycle through possible matches.
The nice thing about the openbox rc.xml file is that it's well documented on their website. Even though it's XML not that difficult to deal with.
With the addition of a couple other programs you can do some very cool stuff.
One handy application is wmctrl
Then that page has a link to a couple other interesting little utilities such as devilspie for application detection and such. Then Zenity or Xosd for writing scripts that output to a gui notification pop-up.
Grumpy Editor - lightweight window managers please! Posted Feb 21, 2007 15:46 UTC (Wed) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] Alert dialogs don't grab the focus.X has a window override_redirect attribute that allows a child window to do this, and the window manager can't intercept it through the normal substructure redirection mechanism. It's one of the ugly things about X.
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