window-manager – Advice on Choosing a Tiling WM

software-rectiling-wmwindow-manager

I've used GNOME's default window manager for some years, but now I want to try a tiling window manager.

I want it to satisfy these two criteria:

  1. WM must be lightweight

  2. WM should not be complicated to configure

Best Answer

"Complicated to configure" varies greatly depending on what languages you're proficient in. XMonad was extraordinarily complicated for me to configure, but that was because I know absolutely no Haskell, and that's the language the configurations are in.

The two tiling window managers I've used and quite liked are:

  • Awesome. Awesome configurations are in Lua (as of awesome 3; before that they were in a custom syntax), but it's quite easy to configure and comes with a bunch of widgets; here's a screenshot of what my bar looked like at one point (there's also a graph widget, although I wasn't using it at the time):

    Screenshot of my awesome bar http://lug.rose-hulman.edu/mw/images/a/ae/Awesome3bar_top.png

    The main reason I stopped using Awesome was the constant backwards-compatibility breaks; every point revision changed the API enough that I needed to spend days trying to fix my configuration file to work with it. It's possible that's stabilized more now

  • wmii, my current WM. Configurations by default are in shell scripts, but can be done any way you like as wmii exposes a 9p interface, which means you control it by reading and writing to files on a pseudo-filesystem. My current configuration is a shell script for the main configuration with a python utility script to do some of the work. The main downside is a lack of built-in widgets; it doesn't come with progress bars or graphs or icons. It's certainly "lightweight" though, which was one of your requirements

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