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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."
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.
Check out Ratpoison and this article at Freshmeat.
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
I know him, and he does.
status is failure. status is failure
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.
You move any window by pressing alt, then click anywhere in the window and drag. It is EXCELLENT, and when you think about it, isn't it really weird to have to aim for a small title bar to move the window? Like having to grab the top end of a paper on your desk to move it.
And the source is very simple and readable, I'm not at all used to programming X applications, but had no trouble adding a couple of features I wanted (like snap to the edge of the screen)
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.
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.
Except when you hit the magic Windows machine of Joe Jackass 'Leet Windows Power User who moved his taskbar to the top
While most of the modifications you listed are completely inane, moving the taskbar to the top is not. This is the first thing I do when I get on a default Windows system. But I worked within the Windows world only after a long love affair with the Macintosh.
There is a reason why the taskbar has been at the top of Macintosh computers since 1984. Apple knows usability, or at least it did when it creating the original Macintosh interface guidelines. And the reason for keeping the taskbar at the top is that users spend the majority of time moving the mouse around in the upper half of the monitor, because that's where most of the content and title bars are located. Therefore, it is much more efficient to keep your taskbar at the top, where awkward mouse movements can be minimized (and that is always good for reducing CTS), especially on a 21" monitor with a high screen resolution. On a lesser note, it is also more visually consistent with the idea of title bars for windows, as you could consider the task manager a "title bar" for the OS.
So flame away about all the stupid things users do, but repositioning the horrid default position of the taskbar in Windows is not one of them.
Blackbox is also my favourite. I'm using it on my old 200 MHz notebook. Startup time: 3s. I was already considering buying a new notebook because working with it and Win98 as an OS was really no joy. But SuSE 7.1 and blackbox made it usable again for one more year and maybe for another one. I even wrote my diploma thesis on it (LaTeX) and managed all lab data. No problem.
Blackbox is really all you need. Not more, not less.
Rince
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
You might want to try bitlbee, which is the GAIM core + a lil' IRC "server", so you join #bitlbee and the people online are your contact list.
oh, and in twm at least you can turn off all twm-consumed keyboard mappings (including alt-click) with turning on numlock.
of course it only helps if most of the time you don't need those special keys/alt-clickedy.
probly this feature is present in evilwm as well.
// "If human beings don't keep exercising their lips,
// their brains start working." -- Ford Prefect
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.
... 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!"
It's at www.lintux.cx .. It works very well for me with irssi and screen :)
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.
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5 seconds? I'm not sure I can stand to wait for the heat death of the universe... Anyway:
$ ls -l /usr/X11R6/bin/twm /usr/bin/evilwm /usr/bin/evilwm* /usr/X11R6/bin/twm* /usr/X11R6/bin/twm | wc -l /usr/bin/evilwm | wc -l
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 19976 2003-01-15 10:23
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 131128 2003-02-26 00:53
$ ldd
9
$ ldd
5
I've got too much time on my hands - I had to install twm explicitly to do that. *fix*
twm is a very fast window manager. evilwm is faster. But twm does all sorts of things evilwm doesn't do by design. Horses for courses...