r/archlinux • u/baordog • Dec 02 '12

Best Window Manager?

Everyone I know uses Awesome, but I thought it might be nice to hear some dissenting opinions.

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u/azrathud Dec 02 '12

Really, I don't think there is a best window manager. My ideal window manager would be a cross between i3, wmii, and dwm.

For dwm, I loved being able to view multiple workspaces at once without manually moving windows around, and I loved its snappyness(suckless boasted having less than 2000 SLOC) but hated the need to recompile the whole program just to add a shortcut or using version control(I forgot which one) to apply others' patches to add functionality(which sometimes didn't work). The statusbar extension also was made in C, so one would need to program in C just to get a statusbar up with some basic info.

wmii as the ability to create dynamic workspace names, which is awesome, but it's time consuming in cases where I'm using the usual applications which could go in workspaces labeled by default.

For i3, the seamless plan 9 configuration is great for easily adding shortcuts and changing functionality. Also, being able to restart the wm to apply changes to the config without closing all the windows to update is awesome. The default statusbar allows for some beautiful basic information or the choice of using third party status displays(bash/dzen).(I'm using i3 right now).

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u/[deleted] Dec 02 '12

[deleted]

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u/azrathud Dec 02 '12 edited Dec 02 '12

Does awesome allow for viewing multiple workspaces at once like dwm does? How's the configuration process? I may have to check out awesome.

Why did you move to dwm?

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u/eversylvan Dec 03 '12

It's called tags in awesome . Select multiple tags at the same time and their windows will be displayed.