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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."
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
Too bad it's gone now, looked kind of fun.
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.
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 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
I should be able to run a nice window manager with a mere 64 Meg of RAM.
I should be able to run a decent accounting system in 64 K of RAM. We were doing it 20 years ago.
I should be able to process 1 million data processing records on a machine with 192 K of RAM. We used to be able to.
Today's software, such as Linux is way too bloated. (Note: sarcasm for the sarcasm impaired.)
I can imagine, quite seriously, in just a few years, someone seriously complaining about when they could run a less featureful window manager in only 512 MB of RAM. The older style artificial intelligence enabled, speech recognizing, natural language avatar based user interfaces used to run in only 32 GB of RAM! Why are today's holodeck based interfaces so bloated?
Maybe it really is all about features.
How do you define what is a window manager? If it is what you can see, and touch, then we're talking about electrical impulses interpreted by your brain.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
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).
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 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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
Who's "we", kimo sabe? I'm at a computer conference at the University of Georgia right now, a campus with state-of-the-art Ethernet connections everywhere and an 802.11b network that covers most areas. However, this doesn't include the conference hotel. I'm sitting in my room reading Slashdot via a modem connection that has given me 28.8 kbps maximum since I've been here. And I'm mighty happy for pages with compact design and compressed graphics. I'll grant that the 15-second download for the evilwm screenshot was tolerable...
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.)
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
Well, right off you don't sound like you are in the market for minimalist anything. But in some cases, typically outside of the (first-world) home, upgrading is not an option.
Fine. Swell. The KDE gang thanks you for your support. Different strokes for different folks, as it were.There are also a bunch (well, me and one other guy I know, anyway) of us who prefer use the keyboard, and whose main use for a window manager is to start a terminal or 4. In this case, it is more important that the window manager not interfere with the applications (OK, really just emacs and phoenix).