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."
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
"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 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.
;)
WindowMaker does the same thing. Very lightweight, without looking completely spartan. Myself, I am not keen on the absolute minimalist look, reminds me of Apple too much (OS 9 and before)
There is a default window manager on any computer running X. It's called Twm. I have tried them all and keep coming back to it. I don't know if it something that you would concider good looking, but hey, we all have different tastes.
gosh yes it would.... in fact, this would be the PERFECT window manager..... anyone mind writing it? I'll help!!! :-D
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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.
\blockquote{(okay okay, you can use alt too)}
This is IMO the cardinal sin of window managers: stealing important application keystrokes. If I find a WM camping on Alt-mouse or Alt-key, preventing my hungry hungry hippo (emacs) from getting them, its uninstalled faster than you can say "twm".
If I want a window manager to steal keystrokes, I do it on a bucky bit that hardly anyone uses anymore, like "super" or "hyper". Then I rebind my keyboard to make those keys accessible. My caps-lock is now super, kills two birds with one stone.
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.
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 ...
..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*)
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
A simple re-bind of the default Fluxbox keys to a more Ion-like config got me the best of both worlds.
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
And tell us the manufacturer of your equipment so users of proper operating systems know to not buy that.
Did that, but didn't really like them. Only
/var/log/messages" always visible.
.Xmodmap, .Xresources,
.xinitrc and friends...
evilwm persuaded me (and the fact that OpenBSD
only has the NetBSD wscons as text console, 80x25
(okay, you can get 80x50 too, but that sucks on a
14.1" laptop LCD with the thick black border)
and only 6 (or 7, here) virtual consoles.
With evilwm I have 8 virtual workspaces, and top(1)
and "tail -f
check out the files
in MirBSD where I publish my
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
but even then, anyone that has used windows for 6 months or so can figure out how to click on the start button and lauch the app that they want.
The hell it does! I work in tech support and the vast majority of users don't realize that they can find their programs in Start->Programs. If it ain't on the desktop, they don't run it.
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 !
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.
It's a trade off. You can either spend your time making the software good and not having many users. Or you can spend your time making the software easy to use and have crappy software that everyone uses.
You can't "innovate" either since that herd of users can't deal with change. Plan9 is an example of an "innovative" OS, it essentially was a great unix2 with a motto of "No really, this time *everything* is a file". Look how well Plan9 did in the OS market share...
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?