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# An Update to 'Window Managers?'

Don Harper

2011-12-22

# An Update to 'Window Managers?'

Way back, I wrote a quick blurb on Windows Managers for running under X.

Well, a while back I switched to Ubuntu for my OS of choice. As you may know, the fine folks at Ubuntu switch the default window manager to something called Unity, which cause a stir. I tried it for a while, but decided that it was too heavy, and to mouse-centric.

So, what to do? Well, I went back to my old standby wmfs, Window Manager From Scratch. This is a modern WM with systray support, full Ximirama and Xrandr support, tiles, and is mainly driven from the keyboard. Life is good.

To install (same steps as for Fedora, RHEL, or Ubuntu), download the source, and install the needed development libraries for: X11, Xft, freetype, Xinerama, Xrandr, and Imlib2. I used the native packages from the OS. Then, simple do a

    make
    sudo make install

(you do build software as a normal user, right?)

This will install all the needed bits and configs into the correct place. Under Ubuntu 11.10, there was an entry from the login screen to let me chose wmfs.

Config is handled in $HOME/.config/wmfs/wmfsrc which you can copy from /etc/xdg/wmfs/wmfsrc.

The wmfs website has very nice documentation as well as likes to some people’s configs with screen shots.

It runs very fast, and very lean:

     Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used       Program
      3.9 MiB + 310.0 KiB =   4.2 MiB       wmfs

Check it out, I am sure you will like what you see.