01.02.2009 23:45
Awesome window manager
FVWM was my window manager of
choice for a long time. It's better described as a scripting language
for writing your own window
manager. The setup
I
used imitated
the look of QNX
Photon. On my laptop (a 12 inch
screen Presario
1247) on the other hand I used Ion, a tiling window
manager, because every inch of the screen mattered. The philosophy
behind tiling window managers is best described
by Ion's
manifesto.
Last year my main workstation was replaced
by a laptop, and I found Awesome window manager. Which
quickly became my new window manager of choice. It's infamous for
changing the configuration file format, and at that time it
used Confuse. But now, with v3, awesome switched to Lua,
which basically means that you code
your own environment, making it much more powerful. Basic
principles are that the window in which you are working always has
focus and always gets most screen space and that everything is
done with the keyboard. It's also worth mentioning that awesome is so
far the only wm using XCB
and that it's extremely good in managing multiple displays.
To note just a few specifics from my setup; all my widgets
use wicked
for registering with
awesome, Zenburn
colors everywhere for maximum viewing comfort, no taskbar or a
menu because, again, everything is done with the keyboard, many custom
prompts (Dictionary, Calculator, SSH, Manual pages...), Ion's
scratchpad imitation, suspending and resuming apps (think Firefox)
when running on battery... A lot of people started hacking on awesome
using it, and if you are searching for ways to boost your productivity
I invite you to try awesome, and use my rc.lua.