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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?"

5 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. One of the *boxes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  2. Ion by rawgod0122 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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/

  3. Matchbox by Moghedien · · Score: 4, Informative

    Matchbox is specifically designed for low resolutions.

    --
    I've come to... anesthetize you!
  4. Re:Evil WM by truefluke · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    --
    spam, spam, spam, spam, e-mail, news and spam.
  5. 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.