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

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: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.

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.

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.

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.

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.