Slashdot Mirror
EvilWM - Minimalist Window Manager
DasZweiten writes "Being a minimalist, I have run across a window manager by the name of EvilWM in which finally my standards have been completely met. Being an ex-fvwm addict, after the recent slashdot post about the ten year birthday of fvwm, I felt the need to share my overwhelming joy of my discovery of EvilWM with the rest of slashdot. The manager is small, efficient, beautifully coded, decorated with one pixel borders - all one needs or could ask for. The authors say it best on the EvilWM main site with "'Minimalist' here doesn't mean it's too bare to be usable - it just means it omits a lot of the stuff that make other window managers unusable." I frankly, could not have said it better myself. It lacks the unnecessary features, memory, and total bloating that most other window managers unfortunately contain. All of you die hard fvwm fans will love it. I'll never go back to anything else."
That most dedicated Linux users are really good at managing to minimilize windows...and windows users...
"You can use the mouse to manipulate windows either by click/dragging the 1 pixel border"
hm, that must be fun on a 1600x1200 screen (okay okay, you can use alt too)
Too bad we can't see the URLs for the bookmarks in the screenshot.
I really want the SKIN TWO Fetish Doll.
ohwell.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I use a WM called Golem with no plugins. It means I get no window decorations and no bloat or overhead. It's hosted at golem.sf.net.
Is it really Evil?
To paraphrase SNL:
Demonic window manager, I rebuke you!
... go on the website and look at the screenshot. Since when the title bar to move around a window is unecessary clutter?
I've always enjoyed Blackbox myself on the old Pentium 200. It doesn't eat up alot of processor time or have a large memory footprint, but it still looks nice and lets you do some basic X goodness. Of course, different strokes... Having this kind of variety available is what makes Linux so lovely.
---
Jedimom.com, that not-so-fresh feeling...
StrategyTalk.com, PC Game Forums
I ask my self if the creator actually uses his own WM 100% of the time. Not that is is bad, actually it is quite good if you are looking for something straight forward... but I feel like if it is missing something.
__
Sig: Marine Stock Photos
Alright, karma burn time:
who cares? No offense to the Evil author, it's a good WM, I've used it. But it's existence isn't news. It's been listed on Freshmeat for *years*.
Does slashdot now do OSS project announcements? I have a few I may like to promote on slashdot.
Or is the X topic really that starved for news?
No offense, and Kudos to the EvilWM team, but still!
this is why linux never worked for me... for every good one way to do something, there are 1600 more ways of doing it that just confuse the hell out of me. I just grasped the idea of window managers not too long ago, being new to linux, and I've already been through at least 20 trying to get the feel for one. Yes I do like the ability to customize to what ever you want, but there should be one, DEFAULT, good looking and very user friendly one out there. Maybe I'm crazy but that's one of the few things I like about windows: walk up to every windows machine and know exactly where to go to get what... just my 2 cents.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Check out Ratpoison and this article at Freshmeat.
Bloat and unnecessary features are something M$ is always accused of, but just look at Gnome and KDE. Talk about bloat! Makes nice screenshots for sharing with other l33t lusers, though.
Too bad it's gone now, looked kind of fun.
(-1, Too Slow)
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
I have never tried EvilWM but it looks much like another minimalist window manager called PWM, which is a tabbed Window Manager. It was the first window manager to implement so called "tabs" on windows which can also be found on for example fluxbox. More information on it's homepage.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
Also check out Ion and ratpoison. Very minimal and can be controled from the keyboard.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
It seems as if in the past an intermediate programmer would test their 1337 skillz by making a text editor or small shell or something similarly simple. Nowadays it seems as if every man and his dog has written their own web browser or window manager. What's next? People learning C by writing 3D modelling software?
What the heck is it these days with people dropping "evil" into the names of...
d'oh!
you do not need to click the 1px border to move it. You can hold down alt and click anywhere in the window.
Wouldn't it make more sense to drag a window by moving *the window* than having to find that ~10-20px tall title and move it?
no comment
I think Motif-like window managers should be the default, ala IRIX, and Solaris.
Why would I want a minimalist window manager? Give me one that has an e-mail client and a flight simulator built in!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"Minimalism is a style of art in which objects are stripped down to their elemental, geometric form, and presented in an impersonal manner. It is an Abstract form of art which developed as a reaction against the subjective elements of Abstract Expressionism." Speed, strict memory requirements, embedded or legacy hardware- there are a lot of good reasons to like tight code- being part of an artistic movement ain't one of them!
You want minimalist? Go for TWM. It takes all of 5 seconds to load, even on a old Pentium 120.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
you do not need to click the 1px border to move it. You can hold down alt and click anywhere in the window.
:P
Yes, as I quoted. Now stop spoiling my jokes
Wouldn't it make more sense to drag a window by moving *the window* than having to find that ~10-20px tall title and move it?
Of course this makes sense, for example when you want to move a window out of the top of the screen.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
... KDE? ;)
I tried EvilWM a while back, but I didn't like it as much as my current setup. The perfect minimalist WM has got to be VTWM. It's fully compatible with the original TWM, with some really useful features.
I really resent the submitters remarks about bloated window managers.
This kind of false baloney really needs to be countered.
And I don't mean to suggest that you should not run any window manager that you like. But don't make silly statements abuot what other people like.
One could argue that Linux is bloated compared to many things that came before. (DOS, Apple II, Commodore 64, etc.)
One could argue that <insert favorite feature rich software> is bloated. I'll try to avoid starting a flamewar but mention some possible feature rich ones that could be substituted: emacs, bash; I'll stay away from gui apps like mozilla, openoffice, because I'm afraid those I'm arguing against are gui-phobic.
The real point I'm making here is that one man's "bloat" is another man's "features".
There is another argument about "bloat". One could say that even a feature-rich program is bloated if it is implemented inefficiently.
But then it can be legitimately argued that you can trade human implementation efficiency for runtime inefficiency. I'm NOT talking about poor design, poor choice of algorithms, lack of skill, etc. I'm talking about purposeful, concious decisions to make certian choices that lead to quicker implementation, not more efficient runtime.
I could implement a garbage collection system into my complex project. Now the rest with extremely complex data structures is vastly easier to write. But has higher runtime cost. Is this bloat? I could forego garbage collection, have a longer implementation time, use some kind of careful memory management discipline, and still end up with object lifecycle bugs. Is this efficient? Well, I suppose so, if you measure everything only in terms of cpu cycles.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
This should be good. I no longer have to use something that eats half my ram--I can relax in minimalist glory. Bloatware begon. Evil is here.
"The most looniest, zaniest, spontaneous, sporadic Impulsive thinker, compulsive drinker, addict"
Man wouldn't it be a mean trick to rig someone's system so the mouse would only point to even-numbered pixels. Half the time they'd have no clue what was going on.
I
Should
Be
Able
To
Run
A
Nice
Window
Manager
With
A
Mere
64
Meg
Of
RAM.
Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 1.7).Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 1.7).
Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 1.7).
Important Stuff:
Please try to keep posts on topic.
Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads.
Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)
If you want replies to your comments sent to you, consider logging in or creating an account.
Problems regarding accounts or comment posting should be sent to CowboyNeal.
Important Stuff:
Please try to keep posts on topic.
Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads.
Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)
If you want replies to your comments sent to you, consider logging in or creating an account.
Problems regarding accounts or comment posting should be sent to CowboyNeal.
And if you use X over the net, this WM properly implements the evil bit.
Btw : I tought the EvilWM was the one used in XP
will they have copyright issues for that?
I for one, welcome our new hot grits... PROFIT!
You should: 1)Pick monitor up off of desk. 2) Raise above lusers head. 3) Drop.
Repeat if needed.
...and we'll be using grease pencils to draw boxes around terminal sessions on our display!
If you want minimalistic, ratpoison is there. None of this nonsense
about window borders; all windows are fullscreen (which is the
default), halfscreen, or quarterscreen.
Not my thing, but hey, it's minimalist.
Personally I rather like sawfish. E would be okay if its iconbox
were more featureful or if it supported the Gnome panel's tasklist.
icewm is pretty decent too. But I settled on sawfish.
The one window manager I really loathe is metacity.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
If it serves no utility other than "looking pretty" or "sounding good", it's bloat in a WM. Skinning. Translucent icons. Glowing/popping/spinning animted icons. Playing audio whenever you perform some particular manipulation.
All bloat. Very nice to look at, but it slows the system down and provides no functionality.
Technically the whole concept of a GUI is "bloat" to a purist, but I think there is too much ease-of-use utility to a GUI to slam the whole concept as bloat..
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I would ask for several features (the rest can be handled by other software of course):
1. Title bars, with close buttons (and optional resize buttons).
2. The ability to have colors and patterns on the title bars.
3. Windowshading.
4. Configurable border widths (some people might like something a bit wider than one pixel).
SFX aren't necessary, and things like drag-and-drop should be handled by X anyway. It's interesting, but a bit too minimalist for me.
I used windows 3.11 a few times during the last weeks, and it ran fast, without swapping, on my old 486SX25, 16MB RAM
it's actually easier to use than later windozes, too. And I loading it on a more recent PC (pentium) can take less that one second
too bad windows 3.1x is rather useless today. I'd rather have this old piece of crap on my PC than a gigantic OS (windoze XP) that is not satisfied with 256MB of RAM just for running the GUI
Most importantly the guy has a link to "Misogyny Unlimited" (10th bookmark in the list).
Nothing bad can come out of a misogynyst, so I'll give it a try.
I would really appreciate, if people go and inform themselves OR ask (in a polite and interested manner) people, who are "inside" AND let them explain the technical side.
Calling a WM a skin is just real stupid, just like bashing X for NO GOOD REASON AT ALL (I can hear people whining about that evilwm isn't going to change that X is using slow tcp sockets or similar false comments).
It's a window manager. I don't think anyone suggested that a window manager is a replacement for X.
People rant about bloat, and people rant about eyecandy, but none of the window managers people rant about hove usable, out of the box normal configs.
What am I talking about? A window manager that has keyboard shortcuts that happen to be configured in a normal way. I don't know if the Mac-like WMs properly do option-Q, etc, but I do know that IceWM is the only WM I've found that has a superset of Win16, Win32, and OS/2 shortcuts in its sane, default configuration. Rather than spending hours hacking away at some obscure config file, or googling around for one that worked, this Window manager worked out of the box in ways I expected.
Keyboard feel is why I've never used any other Window manager for longer than a few days. I've been 100% linux since 2000, and had been using it since 1996, and have always enjoyed how I haven't had to relearn everything, hack files, or lose my couple of years of Windows and OS/2 experience to move up to something better.
So why don't you try IceWM for a bit, and see how much faster you can work with good shortcuts.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Moderate the parent comment [-1 Clueless]...
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
FVWM is good, no doubt about it. Its reliable and trustworthy. However, at this day and age we have more memory than we actually need and it wont hurt to use that extra bit to make our desktops much easier to handle.
GNOME, on the other hand, is a much better desktop solution than FVWM. Also, the GNOME foundation has something called customer support. FVWM has no centralised office and has no standards.
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~ksolway/misogyny.ht ml
Sorry for the typo. It's misogynist not misogynyst.
I wonder if I don't see this in the window manager world. It's one thing to make your own wm just for hack value, and I'm sure that's the case for many people. But there does seem to be a profusion of window managers that seem to exist simply as vanity projects for those who want to knock the big guys like KDE and Sawfish off the throne...
Excellent, now my pentium IV looks and feels like a 386!
The cvs version of kde has had a lot a rewriting to make it a lot faster and slick, while adding more features. I just hope the 3.2 alphas will be released soon!
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
Ion fits on a floppy, KDE takes a day to compile. Between the two there's plenty of room for 'bloat'.
I've been a long time fan of EvilWM. Found myself in possession of an old Toshiba Laptop with only 16M of RAM and a 1.3G drive.
Found its quite possible to run a basic useable system but I had to choose my software carefully. Links (configured for graphics) and/or dillo make a useable web browser while I use run GAIM for a chat client. (Gaim is a bit too heavy weight for what I like, but oh well.)
EvilWM is the window manager that makes this possible, but I did couple that with a basic menuing system written using bash and xmessage. Just because most computer users fall into the "norm" doesn't mean there are no uses outside the box, so to speak.
I hate resized screenshots.
I hate bloat as much as the next person, but I tend to find this minimalistic window managers a little lacking.
What is wrong with icons? Really.. icons are a perfectly good way to launch applications that you use often. The desktop isn't doing anything else, so why not put some icons on there.
Whats up with 1px borders? Those must be easy to grab onto and manipulate at high resolutions.. oh yeah you can use the keyboard. Whats the point of having borders that you can manipulate if you can't really do anything with out using the keyboard.
Minimalistic wm's would be great if the designers actually took gui concepts into account instead of trying to emulate the console. People who like using the keyboard to do everything, use the console not wm's.
I prefer using key and mouse bindings _I_ like, not the ones that the would-be-god-of-interaction who codes my window manager likes. Waimea is the best one I've found in this respect, and now, after the author has seemed to disappear, we have forked it, planning to add a mechanism to script it with any scripting language, to make it more hackable than any other wm. That's what's important to me, hackability. AFAIK EvilWM only lets you assign key bindings to control-alt combinations, and doesn't let you configure mouse bindings whatosever. I'll pass.
Ratpoison is the shit. I need to go put that thing on my system, right now.
fvwm passed a major milestone today, being around for a decade says something about software. WMs come and go but good ones persist. Ditto for text editors. Will EvilWM persist, will it build a user base, or will it be history inside a year? Jury's out. I await the counterexamples as regards ten years being a measure of goodness ...
uhh...alloywm
;x Don't use it if you want configurability that measures up to what major window managers provide.
also check out: a newer one
It, too, is based on aewm. alloywm also has the same functionality as evilwm when it comes to moving windows using alt+[vi keys]. Its focus model is awry for now, but if you want to help me out with that, then be my guest. The newer one supports dockapps.
Use it if you want real titlebars.
-
And the Angel said unto me, "These are the cries of the carrots! The cries of the carrots!"
So being forced to hold down the 'control' key with Apple's one button mouse is damn near a mortal sin, yet holding down the 'alt' key to mive a window is perfectly understandable?
Interesting.
There are thre main reasons why I use E:
The pager. I have never used a better pager app than the one that's available in Enlightenment.
Speed. This WM is lightning fast. Switching between virtual desktops and moving windows around seems to be very efficiently implemented.
Configurability. In E you can configure desktop shortcuts to do anything short of making coffee.
The only issue I have with E is stability. Unfortunately it crashes once in a while (say once every two months or so), but it isn't so bad that I can't live with it.
..lets you use tabbed windows even if the application doesn't support it. For example, you could tab Netscape 4.75 and PWM can even force new netscape windows into the tabbed window.
It's also the fastest, one of the most light-weight, window managers that still allows enough keystroke and mouse programmability to make it worth switching to.
After all, why waste time on something that looks good but eats up more than half your available ram?
(*cough* E *cough*)
> The real measure of bloat is how many features are provided to you with no real reason to believe that you want them.
I think that gets to the heart of the matter: bloat is the stuff included in a program that you do not want, & cannot get rid of. Some programmers have faced this problem, & offer solutions (e.g., the case of emacs in the parent post). Other programmers only realize this is an issue late, & leave it to their non-programming colleagues to address (e.g., the typical PR response by a company many people here hate, ``But our customers have asked for these features!")
The reason I like Linux is that I know I always have a way to trim the stuff I don't want from the programs I run; the reason I dislike almost every distribution is that they were created without this requirement clearly addressed to my satisfaction.
YMMV.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
All of you who are interested in minimalistic systems should take a look at Contiki. It is an entire multitasking graphical operating system, window manager, GUI toolkit with themes, TCP/IP stack, web browser, web server, etc. in 50 kilobytes! It is written for 8-bit homecomputers such as the Commodore 64, Nintendo NES and the 8-bit Atari.
:-)
And, believe it or not, the window manager even has title bars and close buttons
It should be
I win again, Lews Therin
if I remember correctly.
is the way to go: http://blackboxwm.sourceforge.net/.
My PCs use IBM PS2 keyboards, which have a sane-sized space bar, and a nice gap between ctrl and alt. Cost: 2$ CDN per keyboard.
:)), alt+f4, ctrl+esc, etc.
Shortcuts are more than the winkey stuff I eschewed. They're things like alt+space (n for minimize, or m for move afterwards -- like a chord in emacs), alt+tab (and shift+alt+tab), ctrl+tab (sadly, few MDI apps use this in Linux; Mozilla does it
" no one ever said Microsoft and their idea of shortcuts were the best possible"
No, but if you learned Windows, they're good enough. Why sit down and relearn something when you're already using it and being effective? It either has to be very much better, or be quite a bit less expensive. Since this is personal time we're talking about, it's very expensive. Are your short cut any faster than mine? Probably not. And I haven't wasted personal time relearning them for no tangible benefit.
What I hate is when I go to an environment where my shortcuts don't work: ctrl+u doesn't automatically clear text fields on not-X11. By adding to my base of learned shortcuts with new ones (like ctrl+u), it means I augment my computing power, rather than throw everything away and start again because of some silly NiH disease.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Let's not forget the wonderful combination of ratpoison and screen, as detailed in a great Freshmeat article. I have been using this setup for several months on a slow laptop and found it great (once you get the hang of the keybindings, and customize them so they don't screw up Emacs). Not only does it not take any memory to speak of, but by always seeing everything full screen, you use all of your valuable laptop screen real estate.
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
Chances are this fellow runs on a 486DX4 100 because it's "more than fast enough to run anything" with its scary 48mb of RAM setup.
It's one thing to be wasteful of computing resources (O[n^2] algorithms everywhere), but it's just as bad to worship the little tin-god of performance.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
What, you run other applications or something?
But will the Gnome panel work with any window manager?
Ion is a descendant of PWM that is being actively maintained. I've been using it since the last year (after 15 years of twm and ctwm).
evilwm, I would say, is a close second. It happens to have exactly the bindings that I configured for twm. But I do like the idea of PWM and ION to always maximize windows and abolish the overlapping windows concept. It makes maximum use of your screen and minimizes the need to use a mouse for window management tasks.
Hell, I use it on my 1.3 GHz Athlon... Actually I've been using Openbox for a while now; I like its window placement and sticking a bit better than Blackbox, but since it's based on the same code, it's still nice and fast and still pretty.
I wouldn't say that the large number of windowmanagers bother me. Most of them manage to do what I need (move windows) and since most of what I do is inside the windows, there are few wm features that could improve my productivity and hence, I tend to go with whatever windowmanager that runs when I log onto a newly installed dist.
If there is anything that would increase my productivity, it would be (in no particular order):
1. Fewer toolkits with more standardized keybindings. This is happening so I'm not all that bothered. GTK+ and Qt are both fine though I would be happy if they for some reason would decided to use the same keybindings for standard events (which seems unlikely at the moment).
2. No-fuss international character set support. I'm Swedish, so naturally I want to use Swedish characters. The problem has actually gotten worse since modern dist-makers started to include support for UTF-8, as many common apps doesn't support UTF-8 yet.
3. backspace/del.
Don't get me started.
Oookay... rant mode off.
This EvilWM reminds me of 2 window managers that simplicity-oriented people might enjoy:
- 9wm
- w9wm (9wm with workspaces.)
Those are suppose to emulate the Plan 9 window manager 8-1/2. It's mouse oriented.
I used it for a while. It's light on the system. The code is probably above average since it was written by a bell-labs researcher.
Here's the link to the source if anyone's interested:
(9wm)
http://packages.qa.debian.org
(w9wm - multiple desktops)
http://openbsd.rutgers.edu/
-ja
Fear not evil! The LORD will deliver your windows from unrighteousness. There are window managers less sinful than EvilWM. There aren't any that I would exactly call "holy," however. Something like "Enlightenment" sounds interesting.
Anything that a particular user does not need to accomplish his or her tasks is bloat. Those window-minimization, maxmization animations -- bloat. Fancy aqua title bars -- bloat.
But it goes beyond just extra graphics. Every "feature" of a program that you don't need or use is bloat for you. A useless extra "feature" which gives you no benefit.
That's why it's a good thing that GNU/Linux has gradiated window-managers. Sawfish (which is used by GNOME and KDE) is heavily featured, and will suffice for the needs of any user (provided she's capable of running it); however, many users will find feature in it that are unnecessary to them: bloat. PWM, RatPoison, and EvilWM are much lighter on features, and hardly anyone will be able to say they have bloat (esp for RatPoison); however, some users may want functionality not offered by those WMs. WindowMaker is in between.
I personally use WindowMaker. There is nothing wrong with using a more full-featured WM like Sawfish, or a more lightweight WM like RatPoison. However, for my particular needs, WindowMaker is the perfect solution. For someone else' needs, Sawfish will be a better solution; for another person's needs, RatPoison will be the best solution.
Ultimately, the best program is that which allows the user to get his or her particular task done the fastest. That means that the "best program" will vary from user to user, situation to situation, depending on the user's needs and capabilities.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Ok, this may be considered flamebait but here goes.
Are slashdotters senior citizens or what? The more primitive the better. I swear the next post will be by some old geezer, going on and on about his first wm was comprised entirely of two sockpuppets and a slice of cheese.
Their I have said it. Now tell how little respect the younger generation has....
It would be trivial to get exactly this effect with a simple fvwmrc. Why go to the trouble of doing this as a new window manager when you can produce a smaller and more stable result distributing a single small config file? Why exactly do people seem to switch from fvwm to something more flashy, and, when they find they miss fvwm's simplicity, which to a new non-flashy window manager, rather than back to fvwm, with which they have experience already?
The real reason why people like or dislike a specific window manager is personal preference and need and EvilWM, FVWM, IceWM, BlackBox, Sawfish, Enlightenment etc. all satisfy each group.
I also like minimalist as in 'does what it should and just do that well'. (e.g. I prefer using just a browser to AOL's 'all-in-wonder' (apologies to ATI) stuff.)
Am I the only one who is noticing this tendency to lean towards either extremes? EvilWM goes to one extreme while Enlightenment goes to the other.
I haven't used GNOME2 yet, but from the descriptions MetaCity seems to be the one closest to the centre when it is complete.
FVWM seems to satisfy a lot of stuff, but easy configuration for newbies or lazy ones (myself ;-)) is not there.
I am currently using Sawfish, but it is not exactly on the central-zone.
Thanks.
GrimReality
2003-06-01 19:56:55 UTC (2003-06-01 15:56:55 EDT)
If you want a really minimal window manager for X, check out lwm. It's very small (23,508 bytes here), but does everything a window manager should do, and nothing that it shouldn't. More info. at http://www.boognish.org.uk/enh/lwm/. Check out some of his other X utilities too, some of them are very handy.
Here is the lastest screen shot:
.
I have an old SparcStation 10 and HP 712/80 workstation at home. Both have _very_ old monitor that only do 256 colors (at least, I can't find a mode that work with more than 256 colors). Gnome and KDE are unuseable on these machine due to performance. Blackbox would be fine, but it look quite bad in 256 colors.
What would be a good-looking lightweight WM to run in 256 colors ?
:wq
I was comparing them to Windows. Learn to read.
While serial communication does send data in a serial format. The serial data method in question (RS-232 in this case) is definitely byte orientated.
All data sent via RS-232 is packaged in bytes of 5-8 bits.
GWM was very extensible and very cool. If I had a pile more time I'd spend some of it trying to get gwm to compile again.
When I'm doing serious work on my machine I often have twenty or more windows active and doing one thing or another. (Hmm, right now, even though I'm not doing anything major I have at least 10 windows open - one is rendering, one is running a program, one is monitoring the program/render by watching a log file, a web browser, three emacs windows, a mail window ...). Having a window manager with virtual workspaces and virtual desktops in those virtual workspaces makes it possible to organize this and navigate easily. I've also had occasion to use very, very wide windows - on the order of a thousand or so characters and spanning multiple desktops - in database development. Not being able to do so, or being able to do so only with a lot of jiggery-pokery, can be a serious pain and impediment.
One persons "bloat" or "crackrock" (the metacity term for "whatever I don't think you should want") is another persons essential tool. I want a window manager to help me cope with the complexity of trying to do complex things - so my brain can work on the good stuff. For me, just adding more "skins" to a WM, adding yet another design for a button, adding spiffy gradients - thats bloat (albeit cheap bloat) of its own sort. Adding the ability to pan around an infinite desktop, start specific programs with keybindings i specify, use either keyboard or mouse to navigate, zoom in (like PAD++), set location markers and be able to move easily to them - thats all good stuff. Not bloat - even if you don't use it.
... all the way.
Bring the artist to the Linux desktop..
Umm, ok. A window manager.
Forgive me, I'm truly not trying to troll (I wouldn't be much good at that, I think) but that is not news. I'd think most people here already knew of evilwm... Or, at least, anyone who might fit the user profile EvilWM is aimed at would already have found it.
I don't mind reviews and nifty pointers on the front page, such as when Tempest for Eliza came out. But this is a little too banal.
Where do we draw the line? Hey. I found a project called exim. Wonder if the eds will accept it... (exaggerating, sorry, but you get the idea)
Note to editors: Slow news days are just that: slow. We don't beef things up by stuffing the content pot full of sawdust.
Umm, do you need the subs that badly?
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Well OK, it's probably not the original minimal window manager, but there are a ton of "minimal" WM's out there that started with Oroborus as their base.
The Oroborus code base is small and easy to hack. The executable is tiny and hardly uses any memory (it often uses much less memory than those other minimal WM's). I find myself adding features sometimes because it's so easy (I don't normally hack on things like window managers).
It supports themes, looks good, and is easy to configure. I use it with DeskMenu and fsPanel. It takes less than 1 second to login from xdm/gdm.
1-pixel borders?? Bah, at 1600x1200 that's painful (both mentally and physically).
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Please.. I just tried this thing out. Sure it's "minimalist", but without Xinerama support, *real* window cycling or any intelligent placement, it's useless to me. Use blackbox or one of it's derivatives (personally I'm a fan of Openbox), turn off window decorations, and you get everything Evil gives you.
Hm, you are not me, but you feel about
evilwm like I do.
OTOH you're coming from fvwm, with which
I could never become friends. I used IceWM
a lot before, but didn't really like X and
didn't even consider it an xterm multiplexor
until some guy in #OpenBSD recommended evilwm
to me (I don't know any more who it was, I
think I'd kill him for making me, a console
fanatic, use X).
I even put evilwm into the "base system" of
the OpenBSD fork I maintain.
So you wouldn't have to install it manually,
and I needed to get a replacement for wm2 which
didn't compile cleanly after gcc 2->3.
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
My nerves tell me what to use and when to use them. Today I feel like using something that is difficult to use, so evilwm is the right thing. When I feel lazy of have something better to do, gimme GNOME. Obviously, there's no way to empirically sort out what's bloated and what is elegant -- and anyone who refers to themselves as a 'minimalist' is without doubt flyiong on the old worn-out modernist presupposition that there is some undeniable Universal TRUTH (in this case, about window managers)... which is just plain nostalgia.
I dont think it would be impossible though and (despite all the screams of "bloat") it could be feasible to set it up to read the description once and compile/link together different modules and such to produce an efficient executable which could be cached. Scripting could be enabled in any of several languages and the scripts compiled to byte code or native code for speed.
A few common configurations could be made widely available so someone having to use another persons setup could reset it dynamically to a known setup.
Could be quite a fun project.
... with big winking smiley type affair.
Well, nice to see this is considered worth a story. I think the fact that most of the replies are "Actually, I really like this other WM..." is quite telling though. Everyone likes something different...
The environment that is evilwm was seeded a twm config I crafted in 1995. The code started out being based on aewm, a damn fine base by Decklin Foster. I have a patch from Per Weijnitz that implements snap-to-border which, in my mind, will make it functionally *complete* - just waiting on me having time to look through it. Other things remaining to do in the times I think about what *other* people want:
As with all Free Software/OSS projects, this wouldn't have been possible without all the fluffy feedback from lovely users, maybe like you, with suggestions and patches.
"Try it. You might like it."
"Die, GANON, die!"
You can also move windows with CTRL-ALT-[key] using the same keysets as the Angband "Rouge" set.
example
Ctrl-alt-n moves to the bottom right corner
ctrl-alt-y moves to the upper left
ctrl-alt-j moves a window down a line
ctrl-alt-x maximise
Poster is missing the point. Fvwm is not a minimalist WM! There are several minimalist WMs out there, and many of them are fairly nice, if that's your cup of tea. I think larswm is a pretty nice one, and the grandaddy of them all is 9wm. And there are a bunch of others, including, apparently, EvilWM. But Fvwm is not a minimalist WM! It's a full-featured WM that happens to use an amazingly small amount of memory. It does this by being highly modular, so that only the features you actually use get loaded. It's also amazingly configurable, considering how little memory it uses. (Another amazingly-powerful-considering-how-little-memory-i t-uses WM is Window Maker -- I'm always amazed at how little memory this feature-filled WM uses.)
And looking at evilwm's web page, I have to say, there is no way I'd consider switching from fvwm. Their choice of hard-coded defaults do not match what I want. If someone wrote a minimalist WM that did have all the defaults set to what I want, then I might consider switching, but these guys aren't even close. (And even then, I'd have to find third-party equivalents for the fvwm modules I use, like the buttonbar.)
Massively overclocked, with the Turbocharge bit enabled, but still small and clunky.
great, so in order to manipulate a window i either have to use two hands or by somehow clicking on A ONE-PIXEL BORDER.
this is productive how?
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
.. you are wrong on that one. MY first wm only had ONE sockpuppet and a slice of cheese. ;) Beat that!
And so we go, on with our lives
We know the truth, but prefer lies
Lies are simple, simple is bliss
I couldn't help notice the Ion WM but wonder if there are any Oberon track/tile style window managers for Linux?
Some of the ideas in Oberon and it's Gadgets UI strike me as far ahead of everything else...
.
I like your idea and actually support it. I suggest new article subject: top ten forgotten OSS projects. I would publish such review by myself, but it's useless: everything that I've tried to publish was refused. I think /. editors dislike my name (just kidding here).
Anyway, coming back to the original post, I think it's too short for review and too old for news. I think this guy is just a friend of one of /. editors and that's why his article was approved and published.
Less is more !
Thank God it's minimalist.
I need a minimalist window manager.
You know, because I need as much CPU time as possible to run my xmatrix desktop background.
Seriously, that thing eats up 10% on my 2.53Ghz.... but it looks soooooooooooooooo cool.
It seems like everyone is crawling out of the woodwork decrying the bloatedness of the popular window managers. Huh?
The biggest window manager I know is Enlightenment. It possibly qualifies as "bloated" in my book, but only because it was deliberately designed to have as much eyecandy as possible. And even then it's a pretty damned fast window manager.
GNOME and KDE? They ain't window managers! Kwin, Sawfish and Metacity are all very small window managers. To look at one in particular, Kwin does not put icons on the desktop, kdesktop does that. It doesn't have a panel, kicker is a separate application. It doesn't have a screensaver, system sounds, etc. KDE may have those, but Kwin doesn't. All it does is the normal window manager stuff. Heck, the themes aren't even a part of the window manager, they're plugins!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I spent wednesday night mucking around with stty through ssh and here are people complaining about Window managers?
Seriously though, this EvilWM looks like being on the impractical side of things. Having a 1-Pixel border and no minimise,maximise,close buttons etc is going to confuse a lot of people who aren't exactly ecstatic about having to use the keyboard for everything if they're using a GUI.
Perhaps make it a 2-pixel border...
small, useful, fast, intuitive.
Now wash your hands.
The author of 9wm, David Hogan, died suddenly this April, at the all too young age of 34. I have created an online memorial.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
I'm confused about this bloat issue. I can sit down at my kde desktop....which loads quickly (athlon 1.4ghz, 256 megs RAM) and do whatever I want. The features I want ARE THERE. I don't have to memorize keystrokes...I don't have to add scripts...they are there. Some people call this bloat. I say it looks nice, I DON'T have to memorize keystrokes or use the keyboard for things when the mouse would suffice, and it doesn't lack in the things I want.
Something like this or FVWM, sorry. Nine years ago, I used FVWM. I also spent a while with slackware. I spent MONTHS before that without X or a working soundcard. Just couldn't get the dang things to work...no amount of perseverence seemed to help.
These days I use Redhat and KDE. Why? They have exactly what I want and need. Not only does my soundcard work from install, so does X. I know enough now that I could write scripts, I could use emacs to poke around in the config files. But why would I want to? I just want something that works, does what I want it to, and does it well.
If I need more processor power or more memory, well...I'll buy it. That's why they sell it. That's not bloat to me. That's progress.
CenterICQ is a text-mode multi-protocol IM client which is quite lightweight.
Well since everyone else is advocating The Best Light Window Manager(tm) too, here goes:
PWM: http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/pwm/
PWM is not actively deveploved anymore, but this is really not that bad thing. There are a lot of sofware projects that should stop for a while and focus on fixing bugs instead of adding new features (BLOAT). Read more from the website if you're interested.
This advertisement was sponsored by no one.
I am cool with Fluxbox... To me, i think EvilWM is too minimalistic.
buffering...
Where is a good GUI without X ( and don't say mac etc. they have X it is just well hid ). I want something like plan9 with more than 8 bit video and better than the emacs ( besides it is just an editor ). I heard RMS does not use KDE GNOME EVILWM BLAH blah..but come on people (Richard are you listening ? ) We need something like plan9. I wanted to load GNU Hurd but it uses X too. ( Bah, they are still waiting for new X and why ? see debian/hurd posts ) So the real question is what do we have to do to get a desktop GUI without X ?
If I have more than one window manager installed, how do I change which one loads when I type "startx"?
that window management is as efficient as the user. for example, customizeable hotkeys: i have bbconf filled with ctrl+alt's and shift+alt's to the point where its unuseable by anyone but me, which is the way I like my laptop to be.
.rc file away with window managers such as blackbox, hackedbox, openbox, windowmaker, icewm.. you name it. like I said, beauty.
/usr/ports/x11-wm/ eh? oh wait, thats some BSD...
even KDE can be efficient if you know what you're doing. it really is up to the user, and thats the beauty of having so much control over the OS. custom right click menus that let you browse the file system and open files with different editors depending on the output of "file" is just a
if this guy likes evilwm, he should take a look at
You are about to give someone a piece of your mind, something which you can ill afford...
Yes, GUI's are technically bloat to the techs. As I mentioned, their utility is in allowing people to accomplish the same tasks as techs without all the attention to detail and memorization of commands.
Oh really? You mean the fact that the window went away when I clicked the "close" button wasn't feedback enough -- I need to burn CPU cycles going "bing" and annoy the cubemates/roommates/family?
You miss my point. Anything which does not serve a purpose is bloat. Making things pretty and noisy makes for good eye candy to sell a system, but far too many app developers are spending all their time on skinning GUIs for apps that don't perform their basic function reliably or easily. The net is littered with tens of thousands of such projects, with barely usable non-intuitive interfaces that look really, really nice, and which let other people create equally unusable garish non-intuitive interfaces.
Eye candy is well and good for the masses, but let's make sure it works before making it pretty!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I tried evilwm and I don't particulary fancy it; this is obviously highly subjective. However, my favorite minimal window manager is w9wm which is basically just a 50 line hack of the high quality 9wm from bell labs. The hack simply adds support for virtual screens and certain keybindings. if you want to check it out here is the homepage: http://inferno.cs.univ-paris8.fr/~drieu/w9
I fail to see any advantages of EvilWM over fvwm from the site. Every one of their features also applies to fvwm, and EvilWM doesn't appear to be as configurable as fvwm. I already have 1 pixel borders and excellent keyboard control (better than what EvilWM is offering) with my fvwm configuration. I seriously doubt that EvilWM would be noticeably faster either, as fvwm is already very minimal.
Would anyone who has made the switch from fvwm to EvilWM care to explain why they changed instead of just writing a new fvwmrc?
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
The real EvilWM is one without Xwindows. Or are we all dottards. .this .that .xinitrc .plan = eat pizza until they design a GUI without Xwindows. Not screen it is not GUI and emacs is for kids. Just a real down to earth w/mouse GUI and forget about mac I have it and it has X (well hidden). I want my GNU/GUI no X please !
Hot Rod
How does this product compare to larswm?
9wm is a nice window manager, the first one I ever saw that was both complete enough to use and simply and clearly enough coded to understand -- the earlier twm and uwm have really nasty code in comparison. I was shocked to read elsewhere in this thread that 9wm's author (David Hogan) had died recently.
9wm was the basis for both lwm and my own wm2, which were two other early self-consciously minimal window managers (wm2 was first released in 1996).
Meta-L mouse-drag-secondary
Meta-M mouse-yank-secondary
Meta-R mouse-secondary-save-then-kill
I have a low budget for my computer addiction, so I scrounge up old cast-off stuff. Thus by necessity I've been experimenting with WMs with an eye for low resource use. This table was useful for making some initial decisions. Since there are more WMs than you can shake a stick at, I've decided to stick mainly to those listed here. I've never tried EvilWM (or ratpoison, or any of the other hyper-minimal WMs), as I want a bit more of my WMs than that.
I like Blackbox. It gives me everything I really need in a WM without the bloat to slow it down. I've been using it on my PCP 210 almost exclusively. IceWM is also a good candidate, being almost as fast as Blackbox, and having an interface closer to Win9*. (Not that Windows is a particularly good interface, but it's a common reference point for Windows users looking to try Linux.) I've run IceWM on a P133 (where loading KDE made me think the computer had hung) and an SE/30 (default theme looks good in 1-bit), albeit under a low CPU load, and been quite pleased. I'd still give Blackbox the nod, though, simply because widget size is also kept to a minimum, which is helpful on older machines that typically have smaller monitors.
Constitutionally Correct
subject is the message
And exactly what makes the code beautiful? Is it the ugly hacks or the crammed coding style which makes the code unnecessarily difficult to read?
> I can hear people whining about that evilwm isn't going to change that X is using slow tcp sockets or similar false comments
/. post. Do you even know who you just said that to? Do a whois on animats.com and then search for his name in the RFC database. I think he knows at least as much as you do about "slow tcp sockets."
This is truly the quintessential
Quoted from it's homepage:
"Only One True (pointer) focus mode is supported: sloppy."
I looked at this wm some time ago. With the above line it got thrown out. This is yet another example of a good program which has just a bit too much of the ol' programmer zealotry thrown in.. a simple configuration option would have sufficed.