[Eug-lug] Favourite WM/Desktop

[T. Joseph CARTER]

On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 04:17:27PM -0800, Allen Brown wrote:
> I didn't vote because I don't have a WM/Desktop that I like.  I
> just have ones I dislike to varying degrees.
> 
> I used to like Gnome, but they made it like the Mac and removed
> much of the configurability.  Well, sort of.  It was a pain that
> every few weeks Gnome would forget the configuration I had given
> it.  And editing those configuration files without using the GUI
> appeared to be nearly impossible.

They did NOT MAKE IT LIKE THE MAC.  The mac is more configurable today
than ever it was in the past.  The knobs you shouldn't play with unless
you know what you're doing aren't visible, but they're there.  In fact,
they were there back with the oldest macs.  There were whole sites devoted
to doing things with your mac that the average user could never imagine
(ResExcellence for example), and now with MacOS X there are several such
sites describing how the use of Terminal.app (or iTerm or whatever) and
editing a couple of text files can do amazing things for you.

Gnome ... simply won't let you do anything that the Gnome developers think
is "crack-rock", like temporarily raising windows while switching them,
something any machine that can actually RUN Gnome can handle easily.  No
knobs.  No text files.  Text files are evil.  They are UNIX.  They are old
school.  Gnome wants winidiot compatibility.


> KDE is now driving me nuts.  It has some of the configurability
> that Gnome used to have.  But it angers me that neither one of
> them now allows me to move or resize a window without having it
> pop to the top.

KDE at least lets you see the window you are trying to alt-tab to while
you're tabbing, even if it's buried under seven other windows of roughly
the same size and location.  (ie, finding the one terminal needle in your
terminal haystack on a low-res screen..)


> I've never used fluxbox.  What I'm hearing here sounds promising.
> I dislike cluttering my screen.  Does it allow me to change from
> room to room easily?  I tend to keep up to 12 rooms, and fill them
> fully.

Most of the desktops can be made to use very little screen real estate.

I use a thing called Path Finder on my mac which behaves a bit more like a
NeXT workstation than Apple's Finder does without being too different.  It
has a checkbox to turn off the desktop, and I use it.  This leaves only
the mac's menu bar, which actually conserves real estate because if you
have several windows open, none of them have a menu bar of their own.
Does mean you might need to alt-tab or click a window from the app you
want to get at the menubar you want, but you'd have to do that with any
OS.

Plus, on the mac, alt-tab switches applications, not windows.  This makes
finding any one window at most a two-step process rather than always a
single step, but alt-tab is somewhat inconvenient on other OSes once you
get more than about five windows.  The other window cycling hotkey in
windows (and some Linux WMs), alt-backtick, cycles windows in the current
application.  Combined with a free program called Quicksilver, I find I
use my mouse for clipboard, for web navigation, for graphical file
management, and for accessing the various doohickies in MS Word.  That's
it.