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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.
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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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