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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."
That most dedicated Linux users are really good at managing to minimilize windows...and windows users...
"You can use the mouse to manipulate windows either by click/dragging the 1 pixel border"
hm, that must be fun on a 1600x1200 screen (okay okay, you can use alt too)
Too bad we can't see the URLs for the bookmarks in the screenshot.
I really want the SKIN TWO Fetish Doll.
ohwell.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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.
To paraphrase SNL:
Demonic window manager, I rebuke you!
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.
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Jedimom.com, that not-so-fresh feeling...
StrategyTalk.com, PC Game Forums
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
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.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
I know him, and he does.
status is failure. status is failure
It seems as if in the past an intermediate programmer would test their 1337 skillz by making a text editor or small shell or something similarly simple. Nowadays it seems as if every man and his dog has written their own web browser or window manager. What's next? People learning C by writing 3D modelling software?
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
Why would I want a minimalist window manager? Give me one that has an e-mail client and a flight simulator built in!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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)
"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.
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.
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.
And if you use X over the net, this WM properly implements the evil bit.
Btw : I tought the EvilWM was the one used in XP
will they have copyright issues for that?
I for one, welcome our new hot grits... PROFIT!
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 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.
Most importantly the guy has a link to "Misogyny Unlimited" (10th bookmark in the list).
Nothing bad can come out of a misogynyst, so I'll give it a try.
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.
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.
Excellent, now my pentium IV looks and feels like a 386!
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
Maybe that should be the definition of bloat: you should at least be able to turn it off.
That way, if there's bloat, at least it's your bloat.
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
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.
Finally! A WM that doesn't get in the way of Mozilla & her plans for total domination of all computing resources within range of her fiery breath! Yes, of course it is eevil. Gloriously, beautifully eeeevil!
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.
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 ...
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.
..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*)
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
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
Let's not forget the wonderful combination of ratpoison and screen, as detailed in a great Freshmeat article. I have been using this setup for several months on a slow laptop and found it great (once you get the hang of the keybindings, and customize them so they don't screw up Emacs). Not only does it not take any memory to speak of, but by always seeing everything full screen, you use all of your valuable laptop screen real estate.
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
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.
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
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.
... with big winking smiley type affair.
Well, nice to see this is considered worth a story. I think the fact that most of the replies are "Actually, I really like this other WM..." is quite telling though. Everyone likes something different...
The environment that is evilwm was seeded a twm config I crafted in 1995. The code started out being based on aewm, a damn fine base by Decklin Foster. I have a patch from Per Weijnitz that implements snap-to-border which, in my mind, will make it functionally *complete* - just waiting on me having time to look through it. Other things remaining to do in the times I think about what *other* people want:
As with all Free Software/OSS projects, this wouldn't have been possible without all the fluffy feedback from lovely users, maybe like you, with suggestions and patches.
"Try it. You might like it."
"Die, GANON, die!"
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.)
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 !
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
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.
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.
This advertisement was sponsored by no one.
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?
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All of whose base are belong to the what-now?