Your Favorite Window Manager

In My Humble Opinion
1

I like twm. No GNOME on top, just plain twm. I used to like KDE, as I’ve always found GNOME to be clunky and rather ugly, but as I became more familiar with the command line, I began to use the terminal windows more and more often. Soon, I would often use KDE with just one big terminal window, sized so it took up 95% of the screen. I would spawn and kill other terminal windows to do specific things, but it was basically not much different from using Linux without starting X at all. The one thing I couldn’t do without, however, was the ability to have multiple different shells running at the same time, pointing at different directories and running different programs.

I realized that most of KDE’s functionality was going to waste, and that I could trim the fat considerably and be perfectly happy. So I switched to twm and I’ve been happy as a clam ever since, content to use something even uglier than Windows 95 because it can do everything I want it to do without taking up much to support functions and programs I rarely use. I’d rather use vim or jed than any KDE Notepad- or Wordpad-knockoff to create and edit text files. I think less is perfect for viewing text files I don’t want to edit. I like knowing that twm isn’t about to start programs behind my back, as it were. twm is twm and it expects me to start every non-twm program my own self, usually from the command line. :slight_smile:

I have looked at downloading other window managers, or even switching to sawfish (which I already have), but twm is what I want.

Which window manager is your favorite?

2

I use enlightenment, but I also have sawfish. I just got used to En. and so never really bothered with sawfish. I also have Gnome. I like it, though basically I use it the same I use windows (which I never use anymore, but whatever). I’m not much of a Linux freak, I just use it cuz my SO installed it for me, but I do like it much more than Windows.

3

vtwm

4

Responses! :smiley:

(I knew we had nerds enough to get some kind of a thread going here.)

mnemosyne: I’ve seen some screenshots of Enlightenment and it can look beautiful. If you like it, I don’t think Sawfish or twm would compare in your eyes. All a matter of personal preference anyway.

ftg: Another bloat-trimmer! :slight_smile:

5

IceWM. Very small and fast (a necessity for my somewhat older machine) but has nice features and gets the basic job done. For it to be of any use you need to have Gnome and/or KDE libs installed too, but you don’t need to deal with the bloat of their actual desktop environments. It is highly configurable the old-fashioned way, via text files. I’ve tried 4 or 5 others, ranging from the big stuff (Gnome, KDE, XFCE) to the lighter stuff (like twm), but nothing compares to the combination of speed, usefulness, and configurability that IceWM has. I love it.

6

I use Ximian Gnome as a desktop, along with the Sawfish WM. I use a theme which simulates using wmx. You can see my desktop screenshot at here