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."

Comments

Minimalist WMs

[angst7]

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...

minimalist?

[Devil's BSD]

You want minimalist? Go for TWM. It takes all of 5 seconds to load, even on a old Pentium 120.

Re:Yeall, real nice...

[BigBir3d]

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) ;)

I don't understand this.

[Inoshiro]

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.

Re:usability

[ArmorFiend]

\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.

REALLY small windowing system

[GridPoint]

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 :-)

9wm

[danny]

I've been using 9wm for over a decade now, and have no urge to upgrade.

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.

bloat and more bloat

[tannhaus]

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.