wmii

So. I'd been hearing over the past few days about another lightweight window manager called wmii. I'd heard that it was even lighter than Fluxbox (I was skeptical) and pretty much cut out any mouse usage as everything is done by using keyboard shortcuts (I was excited). So, I thought I'd give it a whizz, and, so far so good.

Get it here: http://suckless.org/wmii

I had a little trouble compiling the source, and to be perfectly honest I gave up. I'm not into fixing mistakes, I ended up using apt-get to install. Apart from that, things have been dandy.

So, why's it different? Well, first off its a tiled window manager, which is something that I've never tried before, basically you don't drag the windows about but just let it arrange them all nicely as if they're tiles on a bathroom wall. Which works rather well, you no longer have to do all this yourself when you have four terminals open, it resizes them to all fit on your screen. Its magnificent.

And yes, it is very lightweight. But only because there's virtually no graphics involved, window decoration seems to consist of flat colours. But I don't mind, things zip along nicely.

Another nice little touch is what the wmii crew call the programs menu, you hit ALT+p and a list of all the programs you have installed come up and you just enter the one you want. Which is nice and easy, you need to try it for yourself to really understand, I haven't done it justice with my clumsy explanation :P

So, yeah, wmii is great and light, and I think I'll stick with it for a while, I love the tiling part. Bit hard to configure at the minute, I still haven't grasped it yet...

Get it.