Window Manager
I've now tried a variety of Window Managers in order to determine which I would go with. This is a very important choice for me. I dislike screen clutter (lots of icons, taskbar at the bottom, that kind of thing) as it takes up valuable screen retail space, and previously I've been stuck with very old monitors which won't go above 800x600. Although I do now have a better monitor which can at least to 1024x768 (maybe more if I play around with it), I'm still a fan of the simple look.
I'm also very keyboard orientated. It's much quicker to do things through keyboard commands and shortcuts than a mouse. This also goes back to old hardware and fighting with a mouse to move the cursor, but even with a modern optical mouse I find it much more comfortable and quick to type than click.
As a result my ideal desktop environment is something simple, fast and customisable. I like to have a nice background picture and nothing else on screen when no applications are open. Right/Middle Clicking on the desktop, or using keyboard shortcuts gets menus for launching apps or a list of open apps. I find a setup like this fast and efficient, and easy going on the resources (I'm using a 300MHz processor...). It also looks good, simple and elegant. Throw in a transparent terminal (I don't use "file managers" at all, everything like that is done on a terminal) and the whole thing is very sleek.
I tried out a few window managers to decide what to use. There's a nice way of quickly switching from one to another which is very helpful - copy /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc to ~/.xinitrc, and then change the last line from "exec ???" to "exec xterm". Now when you startx you will have a single xterm window, which you can use to load a window manager (typing "fluxbox" for example), and then close it with ^C and load another. Makes trying out a few much quicker as you don't have to keep restarting X.
Anyway, I tried fluxbox (my previous WM of choice), blackbox, XFCE and openbox, and eventually settled on openbox. Fluxbox and blackbox would've suited me fine too, but openbox just grabbed me (it had the best looking default setup of the *boxes), and seems very customisable and downright cool. XFCE is probably a tad too bloated for my liking, although I have used it before and liked it.
It loads very quickly, the background is set by Esetroot (included with Eterm, which allows it to have partial transparency which looks oh so cool), the keyboard shortcuts have been customised slightly to suit me as well. This is all pretty straightforward from reading the Openbox docs and editing the sample config files.
I particularly like the fact that if you open a sub-menu near the edge of the screen, it shifts the whole thing slightly so that the menu never goes off screen. Very helpful for when I'm opening menus with the keyboard and not the mouse.
I'm also very keyboard orientated. It's much quicker to do things through keyboard commands and shortcuts than a mouse. This also goes back to old hardware and fighting with a mouse to move the cursor, but even with a modern optical mouse I find it much more comfortable and quick to type than click.
As a result my ideal desktop environment is something simple, fast and customisable. I like to have a nice background picture and nothing else on screen when no applications are open. Right/Middle Clicking on the desktop, or using keyboard shortcuts gets menus for launching apps or a list of open apps. I find a setup like this fast and efficient, and easy going on the resources (I'm using a 300MHz processor...). It also looks good, simple and elegant. Throw in a transparent terminal (I don't use "file managers" at all, everything like that is done on a terminal) and the whole thing is very sleek.
I tried out a few window managers to decide what to use. There's a nice way of quickly switching from one to another which is very helpful - copy /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc to ~/.xinitrc, and then change the last line from "exec ???" to "exec xterm". Now when you startx you will have a single xterm window, which you can use to load a window manager (typing "fluxbox" for example), and then close it with ^C and load another. Makes trying out a few much quicker as you don't have to keep restarting X.
Anyway, I tried fluxbox (my previous WM of choice), blackbox, XFCE and openbox, and eventually settled on openbox. Fluxbox and blackbox would've suited me fine too, but openbox just grabbed me (it had the best looking default setup of the *boxes), and seems very customisable and downright cool. XFCE is probably a tad too bloated for my liking, although I have used it before and liked it.
It loads very quickly, the background is set by Esetroot (included with Eterm, which allows it to have partial transparency which looks oh so cool), the keyboard shortcuts have been customised slightly to suit me as well. This is all pretty straightforward from reading the Openbox docs and editing the sample config files.
I particularly like the fact that if you open a sub-menu near the edge of the screen, it shifts the whole thing slightly so that the menu never goes off screen. Very helpful for when I'm opening menus with the keyboard and not the mouse.
posted by shfbbm at 1:20 PM
<< Home