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Long-time user hereLong-time user herePosted May 22, 2007 21:07 UTC (Tue) by kmself (subscriber, #11565)Parent article: WindowMaker project still attracting ardorous fans (Linux in Brazil)
I started casting about for a WM in 1998 after using fvwm2 previously, and trying various others, including KDE and GNOME (well before it was actively power-user hostile) which were both relatively new, very heavy, somewhat unstable. While stability and weight have improved, both remain fairly complex, and GNOME particularly gets in the way (KDE is very nearly usable). What appealed at the time was WindowMaker's visually clean design, its ease of configuration, its speed, the ease with which it aquires a hand-in-glove familiarity, and its stability (I've had sessions open for months at a time). What the years have shown is that as it's evolving toward an ideal, its an interface which doesn't throw you a new learning curve every year or two. For configurability: the Dock and Clip can be augmented by merely dragging an icon or applet onto them (every other dock seems clumsy by comparison). There's a GUI configuration tool (WPrefs) which accesses most of the remaining configurable features. The menu tool allows ready definition of hotkeys for apps (KDE has similar functionality but accessign it is much more clumsy), there's also an interface for binding hotkeys to various window actions. As a result my core apps (terminal, mail, web browser, root shell) are a keypress away, as are core navigation and configuration keys (app and workspace switching, window resize, maximize vertically (I live for this), minimize, kill, etc.). While default bindings aren't quite precisely right, it's trivial to make things so in a few seconds (or less if you keep a copy of ~/GNUStep/Default/ stashed for deployment on new systems). Config files are readily hand-edited, in a Lisp-y format. Visually, what I most appreciate about WindowMaker is that it just blends into the background. GreyBlue tile theme and Blue solid background give a distraction-free environment. Hand-in-glove: pinnable menus, particularly the windowlist (when I last tried out KDE several months ago this finally drove me back to WindowMaker), the keybindings mentioned above, and the ease with which the root menu can be made to include both specifically configured items plus the standard Debian (or Ubuntu) system menus is wonderful. The ability to set specific window attributes (always on top/bottom, omnipresent, and additional attributes) rocks. While development hasn't progressed much in the past several years, the environment is very nearly feature-complete. It's the most stable desktop I've used (and I've used many), and it's the desktop I've used for a longer period of time than any other. What's particularly interesting is to note what WindowMaker gets right that other, newer desktops fail at, notably GNOME and KDE, but even the OS X Aqua interface (I ran screaming from it), which borrows (and steals) from the original NeXT interface strongly, but retains very little of its configurability. I'm not a total bigot (parts are missing), and also point folks to tabbed WMs (ion, pwm), minimalist ones for the hard-core anti-ratistas, ((v)twm, fvwm), the boxes (flux, open, black), KDE (not a bad environment all told) and XFCE4 (particularly for newbies). GNOME has its own well-established failings.
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