Ubuntu Tutorials

After getting a lot of feedback from the crowd regarding window managers I’ve decided to try a few out. Initially I’ve tried awesome and wmii, and I’m fairly impressed with both. I do wish I could combine some of the features that I like from each one–and maybe that is possible. Below are my thoughts on each:

awesome
This window manager seems like it is very actively developed and has a decent following. It has a lot of features that I haven’t even looked at yet, but for basic window management it works well. It has a decent default configuration and is easy to navigate once you familiarize yourself with the keys.

I like the pre-defined layouts that you can toggle through with mod-space. This allows you to really easily toggle between vertical, horizontal and many more layouts without a lot of work.

I also like that the configuration is so simple. I really haven’t found a need to change much (yet), but the lua based config is very readable from what I’ve seen.

wmii

This window manager seems just as minimal as awesome, and even has a few things that I like that I didn’t find in awesome. The only immediate difference in wmii and awesome is the mod key is different (alt on wmii, super on awesome). wmii also swaps the status bar to the bottom vs the top and only displays the space/tag if there are open applications.

I like the dmenu (alt-a) as well as alt-p. I find the auto-find of dmenu a little more dynamic than the super-r ‘run dialog’ of awesome. This is one of the things I like most about wmii vs awesome.

It seems to be easier to arrange windows in different layouts in awesome than it is in wmii, but it is possible just the same.

At the end of the day my machine is still running wmii, but I’m yet undecided. Can anyone offer more tips on usage, scripts, plugins, etc of either?

Yesterday I spent some time playing with some alternative window managers. After spending hours and hours tinkering with the internals of GNOME in preparation for my presentation at the Utah Open Source Conference I needed a change of scenery. I experimented with evilwm and openbox primarily. They were both very interesting, and I realized there are so many more that I haven’t even considered yet. What do you use?

I keep hearing about other window managers like Awesome, xmonad, etc, etc. I’m curious about trying them out but I’m not sure I’d know where to start. If you use any of these (ie; anything other than the ‘standard’ GNOME or KDE environments) please drop a comment regarding why.

To give you an idea about my computing habits, I generally only really need the following:

• Terminal (gnome-terminal preferred, xterm is fine)
• Browser (chromium or something else lightweight)
• Email (evolution or mutt generally)
• Keyboard control (if I could spend a day without touching the mouse, that’d be awesome)

I appreciate the feedback. Hopefully I’ll be able to generate some posts based on using some of these other window managers soon.

So I was just browsing through the latest copy of Linux Journal that came in the mail today and I noticed something familiar in one of the screen shots.  On page 65, in the article “Hacking the Nokia Internet Tablet” they provide a screen shot of the Pidgin buddy list.  Glancing at it I noticed the name “Jorge”, which I initially thought familiar, but didn’t think much more about it.  Then, after looking at the screen shot in more detail I see the avatar and realize that its our Jorge.  AWESOME!

Way to be famous man.  Keep up the AWESOME work.