Tiling WM
 

Surly this depends on how you set up your screen layout, doesn't it?:scratch:

Please elaborate that, I am not quite sure what you want to express with that statement/question.

I use fvwm2, which is not a tiling wm, but often use scripts to lay out a virtual desktop in a tiled or tabbed arrangement.

My habit is to allocate a virtual desktop to a particular task, and set up its layout accordingly. Usually that's either a single large firefox window, or two side-by-side columns of "tabbed" xterms (actually overlapped such that their titlebars are non-overlapped when scrolled, but an unscrolled xterm will overlap all of the xterms below it), or a grid of fully tiled (nonoverlapping) xterms.

I also keep a single wide xterm at the bottom of the display, pinned so it appears in every virtual desktop, along with my clock/battery window and the virtual desktop viewer.

Here are some screenshots to show how it works, and the scripts which make it happen. I just run the script in the pinned xterm, and it populates the virtual desktop with correctly-placed tabbed or tiled xterms.

The "tabbed" xterms, as generated by http://ciar.org/ttk/public/2xs

http://ciar.org/ttk/public/screenshot.tabbed.gif

The "tiled" xterms, as generated by http://ciar.org/ttk/public/2xu

Single column:
http://ciar.org/ttk/public/screensho...d.1-column.gif

Two columns:
http://ciar.org/ttk/public/screensho...d.2-column.gif

Three columns:
http://ciar.org/ttk/public/screensho...d.3-column.gif

Four columns:
http://ciar.org/ttk/public/screensho...d.4-column.gif

I'm a software developer, except when I'm a system administrator, so xterms are my lifeblood. It's just handy to have data displayed in one window and source code displayed in other windows so I can stare at them while editing in another window. Having these scripts which create the xterms in the right place means I never have to move them around, and can focus instead on getting stuff done :-)

What you call tabbed is called stacked in the tiling world. Look at this screenshot, on the left is the main window, on the upper right three terminals stacked, on the bottom right three terminals tabbed.

Thanks, TobiSGD. I knew it wasn't truly tabbed but didn't know a better term. "Stacked" works for me :-)

I personally use Fluxbox in my desktop machine. I have also used many tiling window managers, mostly with other distributions, and I find them great once you know how to use them.

I think tiling window managers make more sense for laptops/netbooks with crappy touchpads or mice. These WM are not saving you from pointing & clicking, but can make your life easier by making more stuff keyboard driven.

On the other hand, most non tiling WM can be configured in such a way that they are keyboard driven too. I launch 95% of my apps from keyboard shortcuts, and arrange my windows by the same method.

Surely, at the end it is just about how do you want your windows arranged and displayed in the screen.

Yes, sorry. A bit ambiguous. I have not heard of this before, but thought it was to do with placing all your windows next to each other so you can see what's going on at the same time. Is this tiling? If so, then you can arrange it by hand, so's to speak.

Yes, you can do that manually, but it is faster and (at least for me) more convenient when the WM does it. Look at the screenshot in post #19. Something like this can be created in 5-10 seconds if you have some practice with i3. It would be hard to do this in the same time with a floating WM.

I've used xmonad for a few months, but I couldn't configure it to my liking due to my zero knowledge of haskell. I left it and now I'm running fluxbox.
However, some of you speak well of i3, maybe I'll give it a try.

I can't vote because I don't use Slackware, but I have been an Xmonad user for at least a year now. I rarely "tile" in the sense of putting multiple windows on a single screen, but rather view a single window on each monitor, and then switch between windows quickly with the keyboard. Natural and fast, and I don't have to mess around with dragging and resizing windows and such nonsense. It is also possible to make Xmonad the drop in WM for Gnome, which I used to do. (But now I just use .xsession.)

A nice feature of Xmonad is that the config file is actually a compiled Haskell program, so you can program Xmonad to behave however you want. However, some of the related modules are not documented very well and there are still some desired features I haven't got around to implementing for that reason.

Xmonad is the fourth or fifth tiling WM I'm trying out. I find it more stable and bugfree than the others I used (dwm, wmii, spectrwm, stumpwm), but I don't yet have any advantages from Haskell because I did not yet learn it. It is indeed an uncommon feature, that xmonad.hs is not only a configurationfile but a complete Haskell-programm. This leads to the uncommon behavior, that one cannot simply copy some lines from one xmonad.hs into another and this way finding one's own configuration by searching the internet. One has to take a working xmonad.hs and then (while learning Haskell) try to modify the xmonad.hs.

Markus

I almost wrote "dwm is awesome," but realized that that might be a confusing statement in this context. :)

So:

dwm is wonderful: whisper-light & elegant. Personally I think it'd make a good addition to the Slackware base, but it's easy to install.

It's a must have on my Slax usb drive.

For me, I like echinus. It's what I like to think of as the offspring between a tiling wm and a non-tiling wm. In floating mode the windows have the normal close, minimize, and maximize buttons, and tiles quite nicely, and just as easy to use as dwm. Plus some panels do work with it as well.

Unfortunately, I've recently began using two monitors which echinus doesn't have xinerama support and the nvidia driver doesn't have xrandr support (though I hear it's in the 302.x series), so I've been using wmfs and dwm. Current versions of wmfs2 don't play nice with libreoffice/openoffice and a font I had created, and dwm doesn't play nice with minecraft. Mostly, though, dwm and wmfs are nice in that I can load programs on the second monitor through their configurations (coding and recompiling for dwm).

<Edit> Just upgraded the nvidia driver to 302.17, and both monitors are functioning quite nicely now with echinus in a similar fashion to twinview.
</Edit>

So, for one monitor, echinus, for more than one monitor, a mixture of both wmfs2 and dwm configured basically the same.

I do now! I use and like spectrwm. It's dynamic tiling algorithm and keybinds are quite pleasing. It's still being actively developed - There are a few bugs, but nothing deal breaking.
If I did need to use something else, I'd pick xmonad, since it's basically the ancestor of spectrwm, written in Haskell. They've got the same sort of ideas going on with the keybindings and tiling behavior. I'm a bit of a programming language geek, too, so I don't mind the huge compiler it depends on.

I find it hard to accept just one tiling WM to come with the stock Slackware package. They all behave, configure, and install quite differently. They're very unlike the traditional stacking WMs that all do the same trick but have some slight configuration differences and/or different sets of window decorations going for them.
For that set of reasons, I think it's best to leave them up to the slackbuilds. Unless someone finds the time to write the All Encompassing WM that somehow does each of the tiler tricks and doesn't turn into a spaghetti factory - unlikely?

Seconded. I've been using spectrwm (and tmux) for a few years. It's good, especially since you can take windows out of the tile and float them on top -- good for mplayer or gui apps that won't fit in a tile.

Every several months I get the itch to try a desktop again and load up fluxbox. After several minutes of moving my hands from the keyboard to the mouse, and back again, over and over, eugh, back the minimalist tiling WM.

I honestly have trouble understanding why people, especially developers who can type, would use a desktop. Frustration city.

BTW, tmux tip of the day: if you don't like the scrollback action of having to use Mod-[ then scroll up a line at a time, you can just type the Mod key followed by PgUp/PgDn. Wish I'd known that one before now.