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Window Managers For Small Screens?

Posted by timothy on from the rat-poison dept.

saintlupus writes "I've got a question for the rest of the Slashdot community. I'm using an old clamshell iBook at work with Debian/PPC on it. As any Apple site can tell you, the iBooks of that era had a maximum resolution of 800x600. Now, I use a 19" monitor and a 17" monitor running together with Xinerama on my machine at home, and I'm used to that much space. I use WindowMaker on that computer, but on an 800x600 screen those Dock icons look the size of buses. Can anyone recommend a window manager that uses a minimum of screen real estate so that I can fit a bit more on the iBook's LCD?"

4 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Windowless window manager by eyeball · · Score: 2, Interesting

    For a while I was obsessed with non-overlapping window managers, and ran a window manager called Ion for a while. It lets you split the screen into resizable panes, each with a tab. I actually ran this under Solaris with two monitors (not xinerama however). Screenshots here and here.

    This may not be exactly what you want, but it's worth trying out especially on a limited sized screen.

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    1. Re:Windowless window manager by Goo.cc · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Well, how about no window manager?

      When I was using NetBSD, I wanted to run console only (I liked the command line and felt no need to turn a free, Unix-like OSes into Windows) but I didn't care for the limited number of lines and columns that NetBSD provided in its VGA console. My solution was to run X without a window manager, setting everything up via .xinitrc and using a healthly amount of -geometry switches. And if I needed it, twm was a command away.

      You can see an example of what I did here.

  2. KDE by cbcbcb · · Score: 2, Interesting

    KDE with the laptop window decorations and the panel set to the smallest height.

  3. I have the opposite problem by ArmorFiend · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I run at about 133 dpi, and find that most window managers (& their themes) have rediculously tiny and hard to configure titlebars etc. I kinda get by with windowmaker and more lately metacity (which has AA fonts in the titlebars), but I'm not happy with either.