[Techtalk] Window Managers ... again

[hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk]

On Thu, Aug 29, 2002 at 08:58:08AM +1000 or thereabouts, Kathryn Andersen wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 28, 2002 at 03:59:22PM +0100, /dev/null wrote:
> > i've been using Enlightenment lately - its very pretty and 
> > doesn't look too resource hungry to me (i'm running it on a 
> > laptop p366 with 224 mb ram (argh or something like that, 
> > cant be bothered to do the sums ;)...

224? No wonder you're not finding things resource-hungry :) 
 
> I'm surprised you say Enlightenment isn't resource-hungry -- I 
> got the impression that it was.

I put a bunch of suggestions for speeding it up in the Gnome
FAQ for Gnome 1.2, culled from gnome-list postings and my own
experience. To the best of my knowledge, they're still valid,
although the Gnome-specific bits won't help you :) 

> My personal preference is for Fvwm (or to be strictly precise, 
> Fvwm2). Because of its modular design, the features you don't 
> want aren't used, and thus don't take up memory.  
> <http://www.fvwm.org/>

Yeah. I first used X on a 32Mb 486 and fvwm2 was basically
something pretty and something that worked. I didn't like
many of its default themes, but it followed the unix tradition
of having a dot-file you can edit by hand to fix things,
and I could deal with that. 

When I got a slightly faster machine that ran Gnome, I 
stuck with fvwm2 for a while, then played around with the
then-current offerings and switched to Window Maker (wmaker,
http://www.windowmaker.org/) which I still use. 

I think icewm, fvwm2 and wmaker are all good ones to try.
They are none of them pared down to minimalism as some others
of the light window managers are. And there are _lots_ of
keybindings in wmaker. I never switch workspace with the
mouse: I use the keys all the time. wmaker also tells you
how to move the mouse around with keystrokes :) This is an
XFree86 feature, so should work with any window manager. But
lots of people don't know about it. Apparently wmaker kept 
getting feature requests for "please do this" when XFree86
already did it. So they stuffed the instructions into the
wmaker package to stave off any more requests.

This feature saved my life (well, my work) when I poured
coffee all over the mouse and needed to move the pointer
around to windows and save their contents before shutting
down the box. 

> (And can I put in a plea for people to stop Top-Posting?)

Seconded :) 

Telsa