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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
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.
Funny. I remember hearing the exact same argument about guis when the Macintosh first appeared in 1984.
After all, I can just type "cp" or "mv" without using a mouse to drag a file.
GUI's are bloat.
Playing audio in response to certian manipulations is something called feedback. If you don't like it, turn it off. It's a feature.
Kind of like the "bloat" of having air conditioning in a car. It is completely unnecessary. Uses lots of cpu power.
Games are pure bloat. We should eliminate them. They provide no "functionality". Why is this different than your argument about audio or translucent / glowing / spinning / animated icons?
Most screensavers are just pure bloat. We should make them illegal.
Back to my original point: If you don't like it, then don't run it. But don't make silly assertions that they are bloat. Some would argue that games and screensavers are bloat.
Some would argue that having preloaded compilers and development tools on their system is bloat.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
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.
Or not even run it at all if you don't like it.
I'm not arguing (from my top level post) that you shouldn't be able to run any window manager you please. Please do.
Just don't call mine bloat. That is silly. I don't use disparaging terms to refer to feature-poor or feature-minimal window managers (or other software).
In fact, after three years, I'm beginning to believe that there is no such thing as "bloat". I have never yet seen it. It is always either:
- features
- implementation choices leading to
- proovable correctness
- higher level abstractions, quicker implementation, earlier delivery
I know I'll get modded up for this, but here goes... Maybe, the term "bloat" should only be used when the software in question is prefixed with the word "Microsoft".I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
> 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
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.)