Window Managers For Small Screens?

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?"

Comments

Evil WM

[truefluke]

Not sure if you're requiring icons or don't mind being a console jockey, but give evil windowmanager a try. Guaranteed the only thing on your screen will be the windows themselves.

Re:Evil WM

[truefluke]

Argh. I forgot that I wrote a review of this thing that goes into more detail than the brief splatter of words I posted above. Here's the URL: evilwm review.

I explain my reasons behind trying out this minimalist wm and how I found the experience. Quite positive actually.

No problem

[nepheles]

Before to the KDE-Gnome era, any windowing manager would suit that spec. So it shouldn't be all that difficult to find something

Enlightenment

[gooru]

Try Enlightenment.

Fluxbox? or any other *Box? XFce?

[Klowner]

Give fluxbox a shot, it uses almost no space at all except for a little slit. And the app menu appears by right clicking on the desktop.. Although iBooks only have one mouse button don't they.. WELL Then, NEVERMIND..

Perhaps XFce would suit you better. The panel can auto-hide and everything.

Klowner

One of the *boxes

[Anonymous Coward]

openbox or blackbox are well suited when you have little physical screen space available.

Re:One of the *boxes

[n1ywb]

Ditto that. I run BlackBox on my PowerMac 7500 w/800x600 screen. It's very real-estate efficient. It's also very fast, which makes it good for slow computers. The same could be said of other WMs, but few are as fast AND as pretty as BB et al. There are several BlackBox clones that also work well.

Ratpoison

[Anonymous Coward]

Ratpoison

Alternatively you can get wmakerconf to remove the dock, workspace applet, etc. Also would recommend editing ~/GNUstep/Default/WMWindowAttributes to remove titlebars, resizebars, and window borders.

Ion

[rawgod0122]

After spending literly 30 seconds reading the man page, and a day getting used to it, Ion was the best window manager I have ever used. It was designed to be very efficent, and worked great as a programming interface.

http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/

Matchbox

[Moghedien]

Matchbox is specifically designed for low resolutions.

yeah, shua

[mike77]

try fvwm

I don't care what anyone says, It's quick, small, and configurable

Windowless window manager

[eyeball]

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.

Re:Windowless window manager

[Goo.cc]

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.

Re:Windowless window manager

[RevAaron]

fyi- GIFs are bad for screenshots. Use PNG or JPG. Your images look utterly horrendous. :P

Eh?

[psavo]

FWIW, WindowMaker also supports 48x48, 32x32, 16x16 and 8x8 dock sizes. dockapps wont necessarily work with that, but windowmaker will.

800x600 on 17" is totally insane.

KDE

[cbcbcb]

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

fvwm, twm, blackbox, sawfish

[Splork]

any of the old tiny windowmanagers will do.

listed in order of memory footprint above.

I have the opposite problem

[ArmorFiend]

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.

Not a window manager problem, it's config problem

[BRSloth]

Well, IMHO, the problem it's not related with a Window Manager, but with the config you are using. You can disable de dock and the clip and even the icons, so you can have all the screen just for you, even still using Window Maker.

There are also some other window managers that you can try:
- enlightenment: try the spiff theme
- sawfish: spiff theme
- icewm: there is a port of tigertcrack, I think it's called 'tgc' or 'IceCrack'. Very small borders and very keyboard friendly.
- blackbox, openbox, fluxbox: all the box variants have small borders, and using the slit you can still use your favorite dockapps, using the "auto-hide" feature.
- metacity: I don't know how usable it is when not coupled with all the GNOME stuff, but the window title bar is always resized to the size of your font. So, smaller fonts, smaller borders.

And, if you brave enough, you can even try twn!

Don't you really mean...

[Crayon Kid]

...that you want smaller dockapps? I mean, most window managers can hide their docks or panels anyway, so i don't see what difference the wm makes.