Tiling WM [LWN.net]

Tiling WM

Posted Feb 12, 2012 21:18 UTC (Sun) by Yenya (subscriber, #52846)
In reply to: Screen size is the problem by bjartur
Parent article: Day: A New Approach to GNOME Application Design

I, for example, have tried a tiling WM briefly, but found it unusable for me. The main reason is that for two of my most important applications (mutt for e-mail and vim for code editing) having windows with exactly 80 characters width is strictly necessary.

Anyway, window overlapping is not a problem, as long as it is possible for any window (including partially obscured one) to receive a keyboard input, without being raised at the same time.

Recently I have added "switch focus to window on the right/left/up/bottom of the currently focused window" hotkeys to my WM setup, and it greatly improved my workflow.

Disclaimer: I am long time user of GNOME, but with GNOME 3 I have switched to XFCE with Sawfish as my WM.

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Tiling WM

Posted Feb 13, 2012 2:40 UTC (Mon) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link]

Off-topic but do you mind me asking why you settled on Sawfish? At one time, it was the default window manager for GNOME but that is an archeological topic at this point.

Do you use any Sawfish specific features? Do you using rep (LISP) at all?

Tiling WM

Posted Feb 13, 2012 11:30 UTC (Mon) by Yenya (subscriber, #52846) [Link]

I stayed with sawfish when GNOME moved to Metacity and at that time did not allow me to configure things the way I wanted them to be (vertical maximization for terminals, automatic placement of some windows to particular virtual desktops, etc.). After moving to XFCE I have stayed with sawfish mostly because I did not want to spend more time configuring yet another WM.

Sawfish is still being developed, BTW.

In my configuration, there is no LISP code I have written (except the
configuration file, which can be modified even without any LISP knowledge).
I have some plugins in LISP, which I have downloaded - Focus-by-direction.jl, for example, is in ~/.sawfish on all of my machines.

Apart from that, I appreciate the extreme configurability - smart window matching, hot-keys, etc. Sawfish-ui is really easy to use, so I don't have to manually look for window names/properties to match, etc.

And I have found a theme which looks neat, but does not stand out enough to distract me. And the focused window is marked by changing the whole frame - not only the title bar, for example - so it can be found even when partially obscured.