Awesome: A window manager that gets out of the way

Posted Nov 18, 2011 15:24 UTC (Fri) by emk (subscriber, #1128)
In reply to: Awesome: A window manager that gets out of the way by mathstuf
Parent article: Awesome: A window manager that gets out of the way

Years ago, I decided that messing with Linux configuration was an evil time sink, about on par with watching bad TV. But sometimes you're in one of those moods, and just want to waste time...

In a fit of random curiosity, I installed VirtualBox, Ubuntu and XMonad on my Mac, and decided to spend a couple of days messing around with XMonad. I figured that once I'd played with XMonad for a bit, I'd happily go back to using my Mac.

A week later, I ordered a new Ubuntu laptop from ZaReason and gave up on my Mac completely. I just couldn't bear to leave XMonad. I loved having all my windows laid out automatically. I loved knowing my Emacs and terminals are exactly 80 columns wide. I loved using every pixel of screen space for code and unit tests. Now, the idea of manually dragging windows around the desktop makes me feel frustrated.

Basically, if you're the kind of person who loves vim or Emacseven if you're a Mac useryou might want to check out Awesome or xmonad. They're not for everyone, but they might be for you.

Awesome: A window manager that gets out of the way

Posted Nov 18, 2011 17:04 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

My last semester at college was making my own setup. Today, it is my dotfiles repository[1] and a comps file on my personal Fedora repository[2] to make setting up new machines a breeze.

[1]http://git.benboeckel.net/?p=dotfiles.git;a=summary
[2]http://blipper.dev.benboeckel.net/yum/17/x86_64/base/comp...

Awesome: A window manager that gets out of the way

Posted Nov 19, 2011 8:15 UTC (Sat) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] (4 responses)

"I loved knowing my Emacs and terminals are exactly 80 columns wide."

Ewww, why would you want THAT? Letting your editor and workarea be constrained by an ages old screen format is just silly.

Awesome: A window manager that gets out of the way

Posted Nov 19, 2011 14:50 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I don't know about him, but I like 180- or 260-wide terminals. It lets me do 2 or 3 80-width panes (tmux) or windows (vim/xmonad) which is enough buffer for line numbers, fold columns, and some room to spare. 80 is obsoleye as a full terminal width, but 80 is still one of the most common wrapping widths in projects.

Awesome: A window manager that gets out of the way

Posted Nov 23, 2011 22:46 UTC (Wed) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (1 responses)

Agreed. Unfortunately, we still suffer from silly mailing list etiquette like "wrap your mails at 78 characters" which is insanely annoying on both large AND small screens unless your mail client re-wraps mails (incl quotations). My mail client does everything I want except for that :(

Awesome: A window manager that gets out of the way

Posted Nov 24, 2011 23:56 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

For me, mutt can rewrap, but slrn does not (there's also some interesting failures to decode messages where =20 ends nearly every line...). I don't know if things have changed since I was using KDE's PIM suite, but KNode and KMail would wrap to the setting or the editor window's width, whichever was less. Since there's no "message preview" before sending, it caused quite a bit of interesting mail formatting. Took me a month or two to track down the culprit. Luckily, Vim has the 'gq' command to rewrap paragraphs and makes rewraping a breeze if needed. The worst is when hard line wrapping happens, but the quotation markers aren't copied to the wrapped line (slrn can collapse quote blocks and the feature is broken with such mails).

80 cols

Posted Dec 3, 2011 0:10 UTC (Sat) by kmself (guest, #11565) [Link]

You'll still find this very useful in circumstances, particularly those where you really NEED the functionality: stuck at the colo with console-only access, or using remote serial-over-LAN IPMI2 access to your host.

That's when 80 col wrapping's very, very much appreciated.

The thing about ages-old formats and conventions is that they're baked into a great many things, including hardware and code.

These change very, very slowly.

What's even more amusing is looking at where the 80-col standard originated -- punch cards, dictated in part by the size of dollar bills in the late 19th Century.