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X GUI Software

EvilWM - Minimalist Window Manager 418

Posted by michael from the good-name dept.
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."
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EvilWM - Minimalist Window Manager More

EvilWM - Minimalist Window Manager

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  • I've found... (Score:5, Funny)

    by craenor ( 623901 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @12:29PM (#6090501) Homepage
    That most dedicated Linux users are really good at managing to minimilize windows...and windows users...

    • Been using EvilWM for a while (Score:5, Insightful)

      by r3jjs ( 189626 ) <r3jjs@NOSPam.yahoo.com> on Sunday June 01, 2003 @01:24PM (#6090783)

      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.

  • usability (Score:5, Funny)

    by kervel ( 179803 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @12:30PM (#6090506)
    "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)

    • Re:usability (Score:4, Funny)

      by DickBreath ( 207180 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @12:32PM (#6090519) Homepage
      You mean I would have to reduce my resolution to 1600x1200 to run this window manager?
    • Man wouldn't it be a mean trick to rig someone's system so the mouse would only point to even-numbered pixels. Half the time they'd have no clue what was going on.

    • Re:usability (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ArmorFiend ( 151674 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @01:26PM (#6090803) Homepage Journal
      \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.

  • Too Bad (Score:5, Funny)

    by AvitarX ( 172628 ) <me@@@brandywinehundred...org> on Sunday June 01, 2003 @12:31PM (#6090513) Journal
    Too bad we can't see the URLs for the bookmarks in the screenshot.

    I really want the SKIN TWO Fetish Doll.

    ohwell.

  • Minimalist...ha... (Score:5, Informative)

    by nother_nix_hacker ( 596961 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @12:31PM (#6090515)
    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.

  • EvilWM? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    To paraphrase SNL:

    Demonic window manager, I rebuke you!

  • Minimalist WMs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by angst7 ( 62954 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @12:33PM (#6090527) Homepage
    I've always enjoyed Blackbox [sourceforge.net] 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 [jedimom.com], that not-so-fresh feeling...

    • Re:Minimalist WMs (Score:2, Informative)

      by Hrshgn ( 595514 )
      Blackbox is also my favourite. I'm using it on my old 200 MHz notebook. Startup time: 3s. I was already considering buying a new notebook because working with it and Win98 as an OS was really no joy. But SuSE 7.1 and blackbox made it usable again for one more year and maybe for another one. I even wrote my diploma thesis on it (LaTeX) and managed all lab data. No problem.
      Blackbox is really all you need. Not more, not less.

      Rince

      • Blackbox/Openbox (Score:3, Informative)

        by bleak sky ( 144328 )
        Hell, I use it on my 1.3 GHz Athlon... Actually I've been using Openbox [icculus.org] 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.

  • So what? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pyromage ( 19360 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @12:34PM (#6090537) Homepage
    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!

    • It may not be news per se, but I don't think that the purpose of Slashdot is news alone(despite the subtitle). Slashdot serves a useful purpose in the geek community as a kind of central area for distributing useful bits of information.

      Personally, I can think of many times that I have seen something in a story or comment on Slashdot that, while not news, was still extremely useful to me. For example, I found out about Plucker [plkr.org] and WindowMaker through some random comments in stories like this.

      .

    • Speaking of starved for news, does anybody else wonder why the apache section shows up 75% of the time on the top right of the main page, when it's still showing the :News from ApacheCon US 2002" article from last November. Geez, you'd think since it was called A Patchy Server that it would have more news, since it seems as though every bug and patch for ms windows gets front page attention.
    • But it's existence isn't news.

      No, you're quite right, but I think you failed to read the post correctly. The point is not that something like this exists, but that someone actually uses it (DasZweiten in this case). I find that quite newsworthy...

    • Does slashdot now do OSS project announcements? I have a few I may like to promote on slashdot.

      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 /.

  • linux confusion (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ciroknight ( 601098 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @12:34PM (#6090541)
    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.
    • You haven't used Rad Hat in a while have you? The new "Blue Curve" way of doing things has addressed these type of issues.

      Some screenshots are here [redhat.com].

    • Re:linux confusion (Score:5, Insightful)

      by simetra ( 155655 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @12:47PM (#6090614) Homepage Journal
      walk up to every windows machine and know exactly where to go to get what...

      Except when you hit the magic Windows machine of Joe Jackass 'Leet Windows Power User who moved his taskbar to the top, is using a high-contrast flourescent color scheme, and is using 2mb wav files for every stinking windows event, has a screensaver that kicks on after 1 minute of idle time and features that guy saying "Hey Vern!" over and over, has changed all desktop items from the somewhat useful standard to one identical image - say golf balls, has renamed shortcuts from the application name to what they REALLY are; for example, Internet Explorer is now The Internet.......

      • Re:linux confusion (Score:3, Informative)

        by petsounds ( 593538 )
        Except when you hit the magic Windows machine of Joe Jackass 'Leet Windows Power User who moved his taskbar to the top

        While most of the modifications you listed are completely inane, moving the taskbar to the top is not. This is the first thing I do when I get on a default Windows system. But I worked within the Windows world only after a long love affair with the Macintosh.

        There is a reason why the taskbar has been at the top of Macintosh computers since 1984. Apple knows usability, or at least it did w
        • There is a reason why the taskbar has been at the top of Macintosh computers since 1984. Apple knows usability, or at least it did when it creating the original Macintosh interface guidelines. And the reason for keeping the taskbar at the top is that users spend the majority of time moving the mouse around in the upper half of the monitor, because that's where most of the content and title bars are located. Therefore, it is much more efficient to keep your taskbar at the top, where awkward mouse movements c
      • I don't call that a "Power User." I call that an idiot.
      • but even then, anyone that has used windows for 6 months or so can figure out how to click on the start button and lauch the app that they want.

        • Re:linux confusion (Score:3, Interesting)

          by escher ( 3402 )
          but even then, anyone that has used windows for 6 months or so can figure out how to click on the start button and lauch the app that they want.

          The hell it does! I work in tech support and the vast majority of users don't realize that they can find their programs in Start->Programs. If it ain't on the desktop, they don't run it.

      • " for example, Internet Explorer is now The Internet......."

        ... Porn Vault?

    • Re:linux confusion (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Weaselmancer ( 533834 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @12:55PM (#6090645)

      for every good one way to do something, there are 1600 more ways of doing it that just confuse the hell out of me

      At first, I had the same problem. But after a bit, I realized this is a Good Thing. True, everyone and their brother has a solution to a given problem. And you have to poke around a while to find it.

      The important fact is that you can.

      More popular OSes make these decisions for you, and expect you to cope. If you hate it, you can't change it. You learn to deal with it. Assuming everyone is going to like what you like is what causes these problems.

      Figuring out the window manager you like is IMHO a Linux tradition. Congrats on hitting a milestone.

      Weaselmancer

    • Re:linux confusion (Score:3, Insightful)

      by TCM ( 130219 )
      Yes, all you are going to hear is "but you have more choices!" "choice is good". While I'm not too intimate with the inner workings of window managers I often wonder if it's really that hard to make one wm that is well-designed, customisable, extendable, etc. so that you could mimick every other wm out there while relying on one source base.

      Too often I find people mix up "choice" with "a good standard". I'm not trying to shove one design down everyone's throat here but rather the idea of one wm that used a

      • Re:linux confusion (Score:3, Interesting)

        by ciroknight ( 601098 )
        gosh yes it would.... in fact, this would be the PERFECT window manager..... anyone mind writing it? I'll help!!! :-D

      • Wouldn't It Be Wonderful! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jefu ( 53450 )
        I think something like this would be a great thing to do. And it could be interesting - I'm not sure it would be easy to find a good way to describe all the options people might want. For example, describing that you want a tiled wm vs not tiled, or an infinite virtual desktop with a hyperbolic view of the world.

        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

    • Re:linux confusion (Score:5, Funny)

      by Khazunga ( 176423 ) * on Sunday June 01, 2003 @01:11PM (#6090727)
      <irony>
      This is why mating has never worked for me... For every good chick out there, there are 1600 more good ones that just confuse the hell out of me. Yes, I do like the ability to find the one perfect match for me, but I'd prefer if my parents had already made the choice for me, and my perfect girl would already be at home by now.
      </irony>

      You know, choice is a good thing 9 times out of 10. Generally, you only want to avoid having available choices when in an emergency situation, like when fleeing from a fire, or dispersing a crowd.

    • "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..."

      Why should I care whether you can walk up to my machine and use it easily? (That's why I use xlock in the first place.)

      Why do people concerned about usability spend so much time worrying about what people can do in the first 5 minutes after they sit down at a 'puter and so little time worrying about what people will be able to accomplish over the next five

      • Re:linux confusion (Score:3, Interesting)

        by sholden ( 12227 )

        Why do people concerned about usability spend so much time worrying about what people can do in the first 5 minutes after they sit down at a 'puter and so little time worrying about what people will be able to accomplish over the next five years?

        Because there is a large number of potential users who will use something else if they can't work out how the thing works in less than five minutes.

        It's a trade off. You can either spend your time making the software good and not having many users. Or you can spe

  • An even more minimial WM ... (Score:3, Informative)

    by CountJoe ( 466631 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @12:35PM (#6090547) Homepage
    Check out Ratpoison [sourceforge.net] and this article [freshmeat.net] at Freshmeat.

  • Pwm is nice as well. (Score:5, Informative)

    by termos ( 634980 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @12:39PM (#6090566) Homepage
    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 [cs.tut.fi].

  • Also check out Ion and ratpoison (Score:5, Informative)

    by FattMattP ( 86246 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @12:39PM (#6090567) Homepage
    Also check out Ion [modeemi.fi] and ratpoison [sourceforge.net]. Very minimal and can be controled from the keyboard.
    • ratpoison is tops, I use it a lot. Helps reduce the frequency of using that damned mouse.
    • I use explorer for my window manager. It's got loads of undocumented "features" and it reminds me once in a while to take a break (exception something...). And since the company is a unix supporter now, I can rest easy knowing that someday I'll be 1337.

      I like it. It's fricking huge, and it's got (non functioning) laserbeams on it's head!
    • Did that, but didn't really like them. Only
      evilwm persuaded me (and the fact that OpenBSD

      only has the NetBSD wscons as text console, 80x25

      (okay, you can get 80x50 too, but that sucks on a

      14.1" laptop LCD with the thick black border)

      and only 6 (or 7, here) virtual consoles.

      With evilwm I have 8 virtual workspaces, and top(1)

      and "tail -f /var/log/messages" always visible.

      check out the files [bsdadvocacy.org]

      in MirBSD where I publish my .Xmodmap, .Xresources,
      .xinitrc and friends...

  • Heh. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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?
    • What's next? People learning C by writing 3D modelling software?

      Are you attempting to imply that this is unreasonable? :)

      -Restil

  • Feh! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @12:41PM (#6090578)


    Why would I want a minimalist window manager? Give me one that has an e-mail client and a flight simulator built in!

  • Definition of a Minimalist (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "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!
    • Actually the analogy isn't all that far-fetched, if that definition is valid.

      I always thought mini-mallism was about low-slung commercial structures with multiple small shops and ample parking, though.

  • minimalist? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Devil's BSD ( 562630 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @12:43PM (#6090598) Homepage
    You want minimalist? Go for TWM. It takes all of 5 seconds to load, even on a old Pentium 120.

  • VTWM is my perfect window manager (Score:3, Informative)

    by admbws ( 600017 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @12:45PM (#6090605) Homepage Journal
    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 [visi.com]. It's fully compatible with the original TWM, with some really useful features.

  • Bloat? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DickBreath ( 207180 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @12:45PM (#6090607) Homepage
    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.
    • "One man's 'bloat' is another man's 'features'" This is why we have diffrent WMs, jah?

    • 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.

      All bloat. Very nice to look at, but it slows the system down and provides no functionality.

      Technically the whole concept of a GUI is "bloat" to a purist, but I think there is too much ease-of-use utility to a GUI to slam the whole concept as bloat..

      • Re:If it serves no utility, it is bloat (Score:5, Insightful)

        by DickBreath ( 207180 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @01:08PM (#6090712) Homepage
        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.
        • Back to my original point: If you don't like it, then don't run it.

          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.

          • Re:If it serves no utility, it is bloat (Score:4, Insightful)

            by DickBreath ( 207180 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @01:54PM (#6090933) Homepage
            Maybe that should be the definition of bloat: you should at least be able to turn it off.

            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:
            1. features
            2. 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". :-)

    • Re:Bloat? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by iabervon ( 1971 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @01:36PM (#6090847) Homepage Journal
      The real measure of bloat is how many features are provided to you with no real reason to believe that you want them. The major cause of bloat is a flat feature space, where the program has no way to know what features the user might want (or might want at this particular moment) and therefore has to offer all of them. This makes for big programs in terms of memory usage, and, more significantly, very complicated interfaces.

      Emacs is probably actually the program most effective at controlling (as opposed to not having) bloat. It has a huge number of features, both useful and silly, enormous flexibility, support for a large number of tasks, and extensible support for a lot of file formats. On the other hand, it doesn't load any of these features or offer them in menus unless you ask for them.

      Compare this with Word, which probably has a comparable number of features, but they're all in the menus all the time. It takes forever to load all of this code (versus a mere moment to load enough of Emacs to do the thing you're trying to do), and you have to sort through all of the features to find the one you want to use.

      The real measure of efficiency is how long it takes the user to complete the task. The largest factor, these days, is the complexity and speed of the interface. Smaller than this is runtime efficiency of the software (although some tasks still take noticeable processor/disk time; generally loading the program). Of varying significance is the time the user spends redoing work lost (due the crashes or user mistakes). Lastly, there is the amount of time the user spends waiting for the software to be written.

      Of course, the task that window managers enable the uer to accomplish is sufficiently straightforward that there are few features which would improve efficiency; most of the common features are intended to improve the user's enjoyment, which is a somewhat different thing. For this reason, most window managers are bloated, although it may be worthwhile bloat if the user finishes the task later but happier.

      • Parent post is a good definition of Bloat (Score:5, Insightful)

        by llywrch ( 9023 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @01:54PM (#6090936) Homepage Journal
        > 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

      • Re:Bloat? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Piquan ( 49943 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @03:51PM (#6091406)

        Emacs is probably actually the program most effective at controlling (as opposed to not having) bloat.

        My goodness, I just realized this about the Emacs design. Overall, Emacs-- at its core-- is a bloat manager!

  • Evil Bit as well (Score:5, Funny)

    by diablobsb ( 444773 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @12:49PM (#6090623)
    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?

    • What is this evil bit of which you speak, it sounds like the kind of thing I'd expect to see covered upon /.

      I don't remember hearing about it though..

  • I would ask for several features (the rest can be handled by other software of course):

    1. Title bars, with close buttons (and optional resize buttons).
    2. The ability to have colors and patterns on the title bars.
    3. Windowshading.
    4. Configurable border widths (some people might like something a bit wider than one pixel).

    SFX aren't necessary, and things like drag-and-drop should be handled by X anyway. It's interesting, but a bit too minimalist for me.

  • I don't understand this. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Inoshiro ( 71693 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @01:09PM (#6090716) Homepage
    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 [icewm.org] 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 [icewm.org] for a bit, and see how much faster you can work with good shortcuts.
    • Hear hear! IceWM is the one I keep going back to!

      Gnome and KDE are pretty, but damn, when it comes to being hackable, being fast and easy to configure, IceWM beats the pants off all of them!
  • I have a fluctuating interest in constructed languages like Esperanto and Elvish (some of you might remember var'aq [geocities.com], my computer language based on a certain well-known scifi conlang), and at one point I read this article [invisiblelighthouse.com] that made an excellent point about how there is such an incredible number of languages intended as lingua francas for international communication, yet only Esperanto has ever even come close to achieving its goal since the auxlang world is so competitive.

    I wonder if I don't see this in th

  • apt-get install.... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Excellent, now my pentium IV looks and feels like a 386!

  • I like their statement about linking (Score:5, Funny)

    by enos ( 627034 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @01:16PM (#6090750)
    If you use and like this window manager, why not link to this page? It's fun and will make you popular with the ladies. Or the men. Or whichever social demographic you want to be popular with.
    Like the guy who bought a hearse and put seats in the back. He claimed that this way he could pick up 17 chicks. You know what's worse than a chick who likes a man in a hearse? 17 of them. I think this applies here somehow.

  • icons? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Suppafly ( 179830 ) <slashdot.suppafly@net> on Sunday June 01, 2003 @01:29PM (#6090816)
    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.

    • 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.

      What sense does it make to put icons in a place where they will just get covered up by windows? I have never understood or liked icons myself.

      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 manip

  • Key/mouse bindings aren't flexible at all (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mackstann ( 586043 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @01:29PM (#6090817) Homepage
    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 [waimea.org] is the best one I've found in this respect, and now, after the author has seemed to disappear, we have forked it [sf.net], 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.

  • The Ten Year Test (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ella the Cat ( 133841 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @01:44PM (#6090888) Homepage Journal

    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 ...

  • PWM is so far the best.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sudog ( 101964 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @01:51PM (#6090924) Homepage
    ..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*)

  • REALLY small windowing system (Score:3, Interesting)

    by GridPoint ( 588140 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @01:57PM (#6090949)
    All of you who are interested in minimalistic systems should take a look at Contiki [dunkels.com]. 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 :-)

  • My minimal is more minimal (Score:3, Informative)

    by skillet-thief ( 622320 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @02:09PM (#6091006) Homepage Journal

    Let's not forget the wonderful combination of ratpoison [sourceforge.net] and screen [gnu.org], as detailed in a great Freshmeat article [freshmeat.net]. 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.

  • Slashdot? Is that really you? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MadFarmAnimalz ( 460972 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @03:44PM (#6091387) Homepage
    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?

  • Missing the point! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Xtifr ( 1323 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @04:46PM (#6091652) Homepage
    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 [umich.edu] is a pretty nice one, and the grandaddy of them all is 9wm [isc.org]. And there are a bunch of others, including, apparently, EvilWM. But Fvwm [fvwm.org] 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 [windowmaker.org] -- 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.)

  • They're not bloated (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Arandir ( 19206 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @06:24PM (#6092019) Homepage Journal
    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!

  • bloat and more bloat (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tannhaus ( 152710 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @08:52PM (#6092588) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Re:bloat and more bloat (Score:3, Insightful)

      by d^2b ( 34992 )

      I'm confused about this bloat issue. I can sit down at my kde desktop....which loads quickly (athlon 1.4ghz, 256 megs RAM)

      Well, right off you don't sound like you are in the market for minimalist anything. But in some cases, typically outside of the (first-world) home, upgrading is not an option.

      I DON'T have to memorize keystrokes or use the keyboard for things when the mouse would suffice

      Fine. Swell. The KDE gang thanks you for your support. Different strokes for different folks, as it were.

      Th

  • Another light window manager (Score:3, Informative)

    by pasi ( 518572 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @09:15PM (#6092681) Homepage
    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.

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