Awesome
For quite some time now I've been using Fluxbox as my window manager of
choice. It's simple, clean-looking and relatively lightweight. Like
most other window managers, Fluxbox is a stacking WM, meaning
windows can be moved around freely and overlap. I've never really
worked well with this design however, since I tend to open lots of
terminal windows and forget to close them. Eventually I have so many
windows open it's hard to find anything, so I either have to spend time
figuring out which ones I need and which I don't, or just let them be
and open yet another terminal. Obviously, this only makes the situation
worse.
To solve this problem, I recently switched to Awesome, a tiling window manager. Unlike stacking WMs, tiling WMs try to automatically arrange all of your on-screen windows so that they don't overlap (although most also support "floating" windows like you get with a stacking WM). Basically, when you open the first window it uses the entire screen. When a second window is opened, the screen will be divided between the two. If you close a window, the space it used is divided amongst the other windows, automatically resizing them as necessary to fill the space. This way you don't have to go manually moving and resizing everything.
Additionally, Awesome uses Lua for its configuration file, so it is
much more extensible than many other window managers (tiling or
not). Finally, like other tiling WMs, you can use the keyboard to do
everything in Awesome, although you can use the mouse as well.
posted at: 14:14 | path: /computers/linux/apps/x11 | permanent link to this entry