I was intrigued by tiling window managers and decided to try using them. If you don't know what they are, here's the wikipedia page -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager
I spent Saturday installing and trying them on out on my ubuntu box. Since I run ubuntu on a virtual box, unity is very sluggish. I explored StumpWM, DWM, Bluetile and finally Awesome.
StumpWM
I started with
StumpWM because I drawn by its implementation. Its implemented in Common Lisp and that was very interesting to me. It means we can change stuff around and they will instantly appear and be accessible.
DWM
DWM is the granddaddy of all Tiling Window Managers. Its the antithesis of StumpWM because nothing is configurable. You want to change something? Modify the code and rebuild it.
Bluetile
Bluetile is very user friendly. Its built on top of
xmonad but the key difference is that unlike xmonad you don't have to install a full Haskell development environment. Configuration is limited to a few items only.
Awesome
And finally Awesome. What can I say? Its really awesome! Highly configurable, with a number of layouts, themes and yet quite thin.
Implementation
- StumpWM - Common Lisp. This makes is very configurable and changes are instantaneous. Unfortunately you need to download and install a CL implementation and a couple of libraries.
- DWM - Straight up C. Less than 2000 lines of code.
- Bluetile - Haskell.
- Awesome - C and Lua. Lua makes configuration easy and that part of the Awesome if very well documented.
Dynamic or Manual
- StumpWM - Manual. It means you need to place windows by yourself. After trying the others, I found this to be a little painful because the point of tiling is productivity. If you have to set things up yourself, then you lose that part.
- DWM - Dynamic. It sets up the layout for you
- Bluetile - Dynamic with a couple of different layouts to choose from. Its also very easy to switch between the layouts
- Awesome - Dynamic with a number of different layouts and tiling algorithms.
Conclusion
- StumpWM - I didn't like it that much unfortunately because placement is manual and it seems very "raw". Its very closely tied to Emacs and Screen philosophy and so even the prefix key by default is CTRL-T. The best part is that it uses CL and so, you can change things, add new commands/shortcuts without restarting stuff. The sky's the limit for the things you can do, but its elitist in the sense you need to understand common lisp to do that. Its not a problem for me but that may not appeal to everyone.
- DWM - Very minimal. As long as you don't fight the flow its great. Unfortunately, I had to read the code to understand what the different shortcut keys. I even uninstalled it because I didn't know how to start. Once I read the code, I found that dmenu is tied to Mod4 (Windows Key) + P, then things started to work. One funny thing though was that firefox didn't show up. Looks like it doesn't play nice with firefox and so, I suspect it will not play nice with other GUI driven applications
- Bluetile - Super easy to get started with. Sadly, there is not much configuration that you can and so, its more like a demo for tiling rather. Plays nice with gnome as well. I wanted to install xmonad once I saw it but didn't want to download and install a bunch of stuff that I wouldn't use. If you are a haskeller, then go to xmonad directly, There's even a configuration available to make it look like bluetile.
- Awesome - I found this to be the best. Awesome is a fork of dwm with the explicit idea of configuration.Tons of layouts and plus it understands and implements several Freedesktop standards. So, it plays nice with gnome and you get menu integration as well. Only part I didn't like was the name because it makes googling difficult. Its the only one in the list for which the first hit on Google isn't the windowing manager. I also found that resizing didn't work. I'm not sure why but didn't spend time on it. Googling also showed up another person complaining about the same thing but no solution.
So, I liked Awesome in the end. Its newbie friendly. The only real grouse is that you can't google for it easily. Bluetile is also very nice. DWM and StumpWM is more tuned for the power users. I really like the small size of dwm and the dynamic configuration of stumpwm but those points in themselves don't sell.
Once you use tiling for windows, there's no going back. One note of caution though. Other than Awesome and DWM, the others don't work with lightdm's menu without tweaking on Ubuntu 11.10. In all cases, you lose the panel (unless you install it yourself and its no longer part of GNOME 3).
