Window Managers
 

Hi all,

I would like to know which these window managers is the easiest to modiify?

Blackbox
Enlightenment
Fluxbox
FVWM
IceWM
Openbox
Sawfish
Windowmaker
XFCE

Please include comments about documentation and required libraries.

Thanks,

Thorn168

I like IceWM's config. Fluxbox/Blackbox and WindowMaker are good too. Enlightenment is a whole different monster in that everything you can imagine is configurable.
There is a LinuxAnswer here for IceWM, and you can probably find stuff on the official site www.icewm.org. It optionally needs imlib for expanded image support, but you probably have that installed already. WindowMaker has a configuration app.
I don't know enough about the others, but they probably have info on their official sites as well.

Reckon it depends on how much tinkering you want to do ;-) They all can basically be controlled via config files which are generally all either well commented, documented or self-explanatory.There's also a number of threads covering quite a few of those WM's on here discussing setting up various options + settings. The *boxes are fairly straightforward to configure and can look stunning, so maybe starting off with one of them - easy to install + configure and gives you a taste for hacking themes, menus, icons, etc. then look at moving onto something more indepth like enlightenment...

Well the reason I ask is because I have been reading the various websites for the named window managers.

I just wanted to ask people who may have some hands on experience before getting involved in a project like this.

Fluxbox is pretty easy, there is an app floating around called fluxconf which is a bit of a GUI but the files are pretty easy to understand, editing by hand isn't difficult at all. Fvwm is like writing your own window manager in it's config files, the result is amazingly powerful and configurable but very difficult to boot. Openbox is pretty cool but it's lack of a taskbar can be disappointing. Pypanel is a good choice to use... I've used E17 a bit, not E16 at all. E17 is pretty simple too, it's has some nice GUI tools to configure more stuff but if not, just check out the --help for whatever app you want to change, the E team tend to cram a lot of info into --help, I haven't had to read a man page for that WM yet :)

out of your list , i only actually use blackbox , IceWM and xfce4 , if going for the easiest configuration , i think it would be blackbox and their related , its only got two or three files to configure , i usually configure the menu config file in an editor , same goes to menu config file for xfce4 and IceWM , for window-manager styles configurations in xfce4 and blackbox , you can mostly do it directly from the builtin popup-menu , no need to hand-config them , as for IceWM , its ok to hand-config many of the options but their config files , directories and images tend to spread out a bit ...
apart from your list , i would also like to mention ROX , its a good one , you usually run rox with another wm , i run ROX with IceWM , can get the best out of both but still not resource hungry , ROX can give you the desktop icons and a nice top-panel , i only read wm documentations for ROX cause it uses it own ways to handle applications which are specified to ROX itself , the documantation is a very good one , just one long page of html ...

havent been updating to their latest version for quite some time , hope the above still stand true enough ...

LinuxQuestions.org - DISCUSSION: IceWM Tips - where Linux users come for help

I tend to agree with alred, IceWM along with ROX is great. You can play around with the various files all you want. IceWM also has tons of themes.

Rox also works great with XFCE.

I only use blackbox now but I can vouch all the *boxes are easy to configure and use. In blackbox's case there are three files to configure, the style file, menu file and user's settings file (~/.blackboxrc).

Rox isn't a window manager, its a file manager and also controls desktop icons and a few other things, same sort of thing as nautilus is. Whilst people are starting to mention their favourite file managers I will do the same: I find Xfe is an excellent file manager, it basically has two layouts, the traditional two pane setup like mc and the Windows Explorer type view, one window with a file tree

Wow thanks for the info. This will help me save a lot time in researching the Window Managers.

Thorn168

I agree - but it has a habit of crashing and loading up about 20 zombie processes with the last thing you executed through it when you close it :)

I've never had that happen to me before, the only thing I've found is that it can seem as though its crashed when opening a folder that contains many files/subfolders when in fact it just isn't accepting user input and it won't refresh the window so you get white spots where other windows have been put on top, but within a few seconds/minutes it starts responding again

Maybe you have an older version? I don't know its history very well, I have only been using it since version 0.80

its raining right now down here , i like this kind of weather ...

i have to mention that i was once being introduced by a member to blackbox for windows together with other usual bb stuffs , they are good , now i normally use that when going into windows , their config files are very similar to the linux ones , if you feel like trying it , go ahead and try it , its hilarious but fun and good ...

talking about ROX , i think ROX is a very unique wm , i mean you can have lots of wm installed on your machine , infact most of them in thorn168's list i guess , but can let them be used under ROX , where you just have to select whatever wm that you prefer at that moment from a drop-down menu in ROX "desktop option menu" and restart ROX itself , i mean those wm that doesnt usually come with desktop icons or some "convenient" panels , and although i hardly use ROX's filemanager but i have to say that its filemanager is fast enough , just very few seconds of "lock-up" for those very "deep" directories , can't feel much of a problem ...

when i want to open lots of files at the sametime , like many big image files with gimp or lots of text files in seperate windows and i also need to play something with xmms at the sametime , i tend to use blackbox , for me blackbox is very thin and clean ...

also not to forget about those wm that can run with very very little memory , one of them comes with a "text-based" filemanager and a desktop popup menu , they are very fast ...

After installing Vector Linux 5.1 Std I got XFCE, Fluxbox & IceWM.

Of the three I prefer IceWM it has a lot of really nice prepackaged themes.

I also really like the icon set.

One other nifty thing about vector 5.1 std is that you can change the Window manager before logging in.

I use Fluxbox. It's simple to run programs when you start x11; you just add them to Flux's startup file. It's simple to add programs to the menu; you just add them to the menu file. And I've installed rox to make things a bit easier when I'm feeling gooey. Fluxbox is helping to ween me onto the terminal. Haven't had a problem yet as a newbie.

yup ... to think about it ... blackbox , fluxhbox(although i personaly havent try it) and icewm pretty much belong to the same category while xfce belongs to it own class(probably together with ohers more light-weight "flashy" wm) ... and until now i'm still thinking that this rox is really one of it kind and its very good at doing what it suppose to do , at least from the view-point of someone(me) who have been all the while just scratches the surface of *nix ...


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I just use XFE or emelFM for my file manager cause ROX is just a bit bloated to me. I care to not have desktop icons.

my current desktop is very similar to your's tuxdev, nothing on the desktop and XFE or emelfm for file management.

I have the autumn tree theme which is very pretty to look at.

Kind of looks like a mac background.

yup ... if talking about filemanagers , i'm kind of hardly use rox the filemanager ... emelfm is light and most importantly it is 2-pane but why not give gentoo the filemanager a try , its light-fast , 2-pane and really highly configurable , the configurations(through a control panel) are only mildly cryptic , you can also create and bring up your own dialog window with drop-down listbox populated with different combinations of command switches before you execute that command on selected multiple files and the resulted outputs can either go to the left or right pane as specified during your configuration of that dialog window ... give it a try if you feel like wanted to ... except that i guess gentoo doesnt has a built-in "terminal" as emelfm does ...


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I just tried gentoo, and found emelfm is better because there's "open with" and emelfm asks you what to do if it doesn't know the filetype. But if you know how to set up filetypes it's probably very good (at first glance). I think it's a shame emelfm isn't developed any longer (emelfm2 sucks :s ) , but also it's a shame that there is no central filetypes management in linux like their is in windows.

It is probably unmaintained now because it is pretty much perfect.

yup ... sometimes i feel that gentoo need the users to configure whatever the users need and know before using it to it full advantages ... infact luckily i'm just scratching the surface of this rather "highly configurable" filemanager , if not i might be jumping and banging my head on my keyboard if it happens that i accidentally lost or mess-up it configuration file ... but all we need is a "familiar" filemanager that just works like emelfm , i still have this emelfm around somewhere if i'm not wrong and i will try this emelfm2 someday ...


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Sawfish is a great windowmanger. It has allmost all the configrable options. A little play with the configration files and sawfish-ui can be a lot more fun.

Bit difficult to start first, but worth trying.