www.duckland.org/posts/201112an-update-to-window-managers.html
2015-06-09 22:50:31 -05:00

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<html><body><h1>An Update to 'Window Managers?'</h1>
<p>Way back, I wrote a quick blurb on <a href="http://www.duckland.org/index.php/2006/07/31/window-managers/">Windows Managers</a> for running under X.</p>
<p>Well, a while back I switched to <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com">Ubuntu</a> for my OS of choice. As you may know, the fine folks at Ubuntu switch the default window manager to something called <strong>Unity</strong>, which cause a stir. I tried it for a while, but decided that it was too heavy, and to mouse-centric.</p>
<p>So, what to do? Well, I went back to my old standby <a href="http://wmfs.info">wmfs</a>, 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.</p>
<p>To install (same steps as for Fedora, RHEL, or Ubuntu), download the source, and install the needed development libraries for: <strong>X11, Xft, freetype, Xinerama, Xrandr, and Imlib2</strong>. I used the native packages from the OS. Then, simple do a</p>
<pre><code>make
sudo make install
</code></pre>
<p>(you do build software as a normal user, right?)</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Config is handled in <em>$HOME/.config/wmfs/wmfsrc</em> which you can copy from <em>/etc/xdg/wmfs/wmfsrc</em>.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://wmfs.info">wmfs website</a> has very nice documentation as well as likes to some peoples configs with screen shots.</p>
<p>It runs very fast, and very lean:</p>
<pre><code> Private + Shared = RAM used Program
3.9 MiB + 310.0 KiB = 4.2 MiB wmfs
</code></pre>
<p>Check it out, I am sure you will like what you see.</p></body></html>