Killing Clutter With The Antidesktop

Espectr0 writes "Hate window managers? Cannot live without one? Well, you can, kind of. A Freshmeat editorial called 'The Antidesktop' talks about how you can get rid of flashy, bloaty window managers without loosing functionality." It depends on how many tasks you want to keep track of in your head, too.

Comments

loose versus lose

[DuncMan]

sigh... that should read "... without losing functionality". Two very different words.

Re:loose versus lose

[DeadSea]

More and more people seem to be getting this one wrong. It isn't even hard to remember, if you think about it.

• loose - rhymes with moose and goose. "I set the dog loose to run in the woods."
• lose - present tense of lost. Related to loss. Those words only have one 'o', so "lose" has only one as well. "We need to get another goal, I don't want to lose."

EvilWM

[sfraggle]

For the less radical EvilWM is a similarly "minimalist" window manager. There are no menus or icons, the only window decoration is a 1 pixel border.

Lightweight window managers

[sfbanutt]

Another lightweight window manager is called lwm. It can be found at http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/project/windowmgr/sr c/lwm/lwm.html It has most of the advantages of ratpoison, but allows real windows. I believe there is a debian package for it and I know there's a gentoo ebuild. It's great on an older laptop if you're going to run X.

jim

If ratpoison is too minimal for you..

[Xzzy]

..try larswm.

It's not the eden of windows managers, but what it DOES offer is the ability to manage every window on your desktop via the keyboard, it maximizes the amount of your desktop you get to use for working, yet still retains the ability to keep the mouse useful. It also offers rudimentary window managing features so those odd applications that refuse to cooperate can still be used (such as gimp).

I use it full time these days, it took me a couple days to get into the rhythm but now, considering using anything else is unthinkable.

I tried ratpoison, liked the philosophy, but it seemed to me it took the keyboard driven GUI philosophy way too far to be useful for an X session.

And for others.......

[IamTheRealMike]

For those who like the "lite" approach, but don't want to go quite this extreme, try FluxBox.

It can do tabbed windows, task switching, virtual desktops, keygrabbing (emacs style keybindings from all over your desktop) and so on. If you run it without a desktop, and if you have the Xscreensaver collection then you can run:

/usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver/atlantis -root -texture

and get a beautiful animated dolphin as your "wallpaper". I think that's the command anyway, i'm at work so please correct me if wrong. If you're going to save CPU cycles in one way, you might as well spend them in another :)

Re:X-windows

[Anonymous Coward]

it's called x-window

Re:I have NO clutter.

[SirSlud]

same effect can be achieved with blackbox or icewm .. I could never get sawfish happy on my box, but that was more due to my own laziness than any shortcoming in sawfish.

Re:Is it just me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not quite an emacs window manager. The closest thing I've found the the emacs experience in the window manager arena is Ion It has the frames and minibuffer thing going for it.
My desktop at work is dual-head running several Ion frames, with emacs windows, xterms, and galeon windows. Its really all I need. If Emacs were to gain the ability to run graphical applications in emacs buffers similar to how it can currently run console apps, it would be the perfect window manager for what I (and I think a lot of other people here) want out of a desktop.

Screen is great

[DustMagnet]

For those of you that do lots of work with the command line, give screen a try. It's great to just disconnect at work and then reconnect at home, right where I left off. I normally have five to ten consoles running under it. I started using it back when my 56K modem would disconnect me. With screen, I never lose my place.

Re:I have NO clutter.

[peterpi]

(This is not flamebait; I just want to show that you don't need plain black to be fast).

I use Windows 2000. My desktop is a mess of icons. I don't look at them, and I don't click on them either. I just hit Windows-D, type in the first couple of characters for the one I want, and press return.

For example, "i" launches Internet Exploer, "ou" launches Outlook, "ba" launches bash in cygwin, "v" launches vi... you get the picture. This has the advantage that anybody else can still use the computer.

For example, to type an email, I would do the following:

Windows-D
o (return)
CTRL-n
(to)
tab tab
(subject)
tab
(content)
CTRL-enter

... and the email is sent.

Command lines are all good and well, and I love bash to death, but don't knock GUIs if you're just using them wrong.

Me too.

[eyeball]

I just made a similar switch after using every combination of desktop/window manager made over the last 10 years.

I run a SunBlade 100 with two heads, and a SunPCi Intel coprocessor card (since I need to dip into our the company exchange server). I use the ion window manager, which gives not only split-screen windowing, but multiple tabs per window. Monitor one is usually debugging output or programming reference material on the left, emacs on the right, console and email at the bottom (a second full-screen workspace gives me Oracle GUI stuff). Monitor two is my windows (Outlook, instant messengers, etc..) Eventually I'm going to integrate some more Afterstep/WindowMaker type applets, but no rush.

Anyway, for you screenshot junkies, check it out:
Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2

I can't say exactly what's caused my frustration with the overlapped windowing metaphor, but whatever it is, it's gone now. I urge people to try it out before dismissing it as a joke.

ion is available here: http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/

Sounds like Launchbar on OS X

[chigaze]

I use Launchbar on OS X and it gives me this functionality plus, without having to have everything on my desktop.

It indexes the contents of my drive including browser bookmarks, email addresses, preference panels, Watson tools, and documents. I can hit a hotkey, type the first few letters of what I'm looking for and am given a list of all the possible matches. I can then select the one I want. It remembers what my selections have been so the next time those selections are at the top of the list.

It can also function as an app switcher and a temporary shelf for moving files. As well I can drag documents to the selected app on the shelf to launch them with that app.

First shareware app I bought with an hour of using it.

i'm trying it out, and it's pretty cool so far

[terrified]

after reading the article a couple days ago, i thought i'd give these ideas a try. I'm a longtime screen user, and it's really changed the way i administrate and use *nix boxes. it's wonderful.

Once i got ratpoison going, i needed some other things to make it truly useful and comfortable:

• This guy's patch for adding dockapps to ratpoison. very nice. patched ratpoison-1.1.1 just fine.
• keylaunch, which allows arbitrary keystrokes to perform arbitrary commands (arbitrarily :)
• ratmenu, which i haven't put into use yet, but allows keyboard-navigable menus on the screen, created dynamically.

this setup definately has some advantages: i'm not obsessing over the right KDE theme and color, there's no clutter at all on the screen, and, as a screen junkie, it just feels right.

there's a lot of bashing these ideas going on (at least right now) in this discussion, but i'd advise you to try it out for a while, particularly if you're a screen-keyboardy kind of person.

I don't know if i'll keep this setup or not. next step for me is to stop using mozilla and play around with phoenix instead. but, with today's earlier story of the cool new stuff coming in KDE3.1 this experiment, though useful, might be short-lived.

For the sake of continuity (and gratuitous attempt at scoring a few karmasnacks), here's my setup:

My $HOME/.ratpoisonrc:

startup_message off
defbargravity sw
exec Esetroot -scale /home/eafarris/.kde/share/wallpapers/Horesh.jpg
e xec keylaunch
exec xscreensaver
exec gnome-terminal --hide-menubar -e="ssh kermit"
exec mozilla
exec wmCalClock -S -24
exec wmMoonClock -lat 39.7 -lon 78.9
exec wmmon
exec wmmemmon
exec wmnd -i etho -m wmnet
select 0

basic stuff, some dock apps, a ssh into another box (with a screen session on it), a pretty background, moz, no biggie.

My $HOME/.keylaunchrc:

# Format:
# key=...KeyName:Command
#
# ... No modifier
# *.. Shift
# .*. Ctrl
# ..* Alt

key=...XF86Back:ratpoison -c prev
key=...XF86Forward:ratpoison -c next
key=...XF86Standby:xscreensaver-command -lock

key=..*F1:ratpoison -c 'select 0'
key=..*F2:ratpoison -c 'select 1'
key=..*F3:ratpoison -c 'select 2'
key=..*F4:ratpoison -c 'select 3'
key=..*F5:ratpoison -c 'select 4'
key=..*F6:ratpoison -c 'select 5'

(i have a Microsoft Internet Keyboard, which has a bunch of extra keys). Right now i'm not remapping very many of these keys, i've only been playing around for two days. but you get the idea. A cool thing about ratpoison is that a command-line can control the wm (all that ratpoison -c stuff), so i get the flexibility and speed and power without the wm having so many "features."

What i have right now feels like gnu screen for X, which is a marvelous thing, right now, for me. My opinion will most likely change in the future, as i have yet to find the setup that's perfect. At least with X i have a choice. But so far, i'm optimistic. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Browser keyboard navigation

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I know you CAN navigate a web page in Mozilla using the keyboard, but scroll down seven pages until you see a link you're interested in, press "TAB" and notice how it scrolls all the way back to the top where the first link is. F--king brain-dead. Useless.

Check out Phoenix's Type Ahead feature, which allows you to type the text of the URL you want to go to. It really makes you wonder why noone implemented it before.

(Type Ahead is disabled in Phoenix 0.3 for some reason; use 0.2 to try it out.)

splitvt

[tweek]

I'm surprised noone mentioned splitvt at all. I use this in combination with screen when I want to group logical windows on one screen(the program) screen.

You can check it out here.

It only has three keybindings and includes a ^O for command mode that allows you to resize the windows.

Oh my god!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

xmda - this is freaking great!! Thank you so much! I love it. (I know what I am doing for the rest of my afternoon) Ooo yeah!!

From Plan 9: 9wm

[sward]

If you folks want a really light-weight window manager, you should look at 9wm. Decorations? What are those? The same goes for most other sort of processing that's outside of what the apps themselves do. I've seen it used (personally, I like Window Maker) with a simple black background. The focused window has a black border, the other windows have white borders. And that's it.

Re:Ion WM rocks... is there a Windoz equivalent?

[archen]

Not really. I'd ask if you just wanted to get rid of the bloat, but since your on Win2k, you aren't getting rid of it anyway. With tweakUI you can hide all the icons on the desktop. You can set up short-cut keys on everything on the start menu by right clicking (on a program in the start menu) and going to properties, and entering a shortcut key, [ctrl+alt+m] for mozilla for instance. The command line is instantly available by using [winkey+r] as well as windows explorer [winkey+e].

Re:Here's the low-down

[RevAaron]

While both NeXTStep and MacOS X look great, their windowing systems come with a significant loss in features; in particular, they are not network transparent.

Not quite, buster. :)

Apple screwed up with it's Quartz/DisplayPDF display system by not providing display redirection over the network. According to what was said at WWDC conferences, they didn't think it was an important enough feature to go to all the work to implement. While I wish I had it, I tend to agree. Most users don't use it all that often, especially regular desktop Mac users. I know why it can be extremely useful, but most people don't need it, so Apple didn't bother.

However, since the first version NeXTSTEP, which relied on DisplayPostScript. Along with the other OSes in this lineage that used DPS- OpenStep, Rhapsody, and Mac OS X Server (up to 1.2), NeXTSTEP had network transparency. It worked just like it does in X11. On the machine on which the app will be displayed, you can check a box to allow such-and-such a host to connect to your DisplayPostScript server. Telnet to the machine. Run the app with "/Apps/RenderMan.app/RenderMan -NSHost 192.168.0.1"

This switch changed to "-NXHost" with OpenStep 4.0 and later. With it, you could run a full NeXTSTEP/OpenStep/Mac OS X Server 1.2 session on a Windows machine running OpenStep for Windows- Dock, Workspace.app and all.

Also, there was a little GUI app included with NeXTSTEP called "Open Sesame" that automated this, just had to enter in the relevant information and click OK.

Yup, just like that. Because NeXTSTEP used PostScript to display its windows, this feature was pretty straightforward to implement. You don't have to figure out how to encode the data for streaming. Apple could easily do it for OS X, but they decided to dick us in stead.

Mainframes Session Managers There First

[Mittermeyer]

There is a class of software that as far as I know only exists commercially on IBM mainframes. They are called Session Managers, and allow multiple sessions to multiple VTAM apps to one physical session with an optional centralized security authentication.

Each session can be swapped onto the screen as the primary Current session (sound familiar?), and the other sessions can be switched to at the touch of a button. One extra doodad we have even allows a list to be called up in the middle of ANY app and another session selected straight off that list.

In addition you can have instant messaging between any session manager sessions so authorized, cut-and-pasting between dissimilar apps, broadcast messages that can be targetted at different users on specific apps on different host machines, and all sorts of other spiffy things. Plus, to get really esoteric the Session Manager can be used as middleware (albeit kludgy).

Now mind you this is the well-defined very specific very character-only world of TN3270E as oppossed to X-GUI issues, so this is very much apples-and-microsofts, but the concept is well-defined and in production at mainframe sites all over, so any SCREEN fans ought to check them out.

The two primary products in this category are Multsess and Candle Supersession.