Tiling WM [LWN.net]

Tiling WM

Posted Feb 13, 2012 2:40 UTC (Mon) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876)
In reply to: Tiling WM by Yenya
Parent article: Day: A New Approach to GNOME Application Design

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?

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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.