On 17:11 Mon 22 Dec , Andreas Niederl wrote: > Hi, > > Man Shankar wrote: > > Hello, > > > > I want to try out the tiling window managers. I would want to know the > > experiences of the users about awesome and xmonad. Primarily i would > > like to know which of those two tiling WMs has worked for you guys. The > > hurdles you encountered and the gains you got thereof. > > > > Currently i am a happy e16 user, but the fact that the tiling WMs > > "manage" the windows makes me attracted to them. Please comment. > > > > I switched from e16 to xmonad last summer and haven't regret it so far. > One important thing though is to get used to the tiling paradigm, i.e. > letting the wm do all the resize and positioning work. I suggest you try > it some time and see if it fits you. > Personally I started using it only on my home pc while I kept e16 on the > laptop for work until I couldn't resist a complete switch to it anymore.
Thanks everybody for replying. I am sorry i am late on this as i was having trouble with a hard disk (thats for later). In the uptime that i got, i have managed to figure out that the 'fairh' tiling algo suits me. I have also realized that now only seldom i use the mouse and also e16. Although i miss the native transparency of e16 but apart from that i have absolutely nothing against awesome. When i have time (someday) i will xcompmgr a try. Hopefully a git ebuild of it exists somewhere. > > I've recently also started using awesome in a few virtual machines, > mainly due to the large size of the xmonad dependencies (GHC takes up > quite some space). > >From my point of view they both look fairly the same with awesome having > a few more features (tagging, widgets). > > It also helps to regard the configuration file (xmonad and >= > awesome-3.0) as the main program, e.g. my xmonad.hs looks a bit like a > Haskell program where different modules get imported and the main window > manager module loaded at the end. > You can do quite a lot with those two. > > Aside from that, the main difference between them are the programming > languages they're written in because you have to use it for the > configuration file. > Awesome uses Lua which is a simple but powerful imperative scripting > language and xmonad uses Haskell, an advanced functional programming > language which many consider as rather hard to learn. > > Personally, I didn't know anything about Haskell before using xmonad and > I have to admit that I had a few very hard times with it when I wanted > to do some advanced (or even simple) configuration changes. But once you > wind your head around the functional paradigm (and all those operators > and monads) you can do a lot with it. > Have a look at the xmonad config archive[1] for some examples. > I agree for someone new to the functional paradigm(me!!) it is initially daunting. But once i am against such a situation i try to pick up someone else's config and start from there. And besides, to use xmonad you just perhaps need to remember your key-shortcuts, once a config file is set. There is not much to interfere with these tiling beauties!! > If you're going to use awesome I'd recommend having a look at > x11-misc/dmenu as I didn't see any default integration of it in the > awesome config (though I might have missed it). > > > Regards, > Andi > > [1] http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive Oh dmenu is a beauty, used it during my openbox days; who needs fancy menus?? In awesome-3.1 i have keybinding({ modkey }, "z", function () awful.util.spawn("exec `dmenu_path | dmenu -b`") end):add() works well. So, awesome it is for the moment until I get the itch to switch !! By the way Greetings and Happy New Year:2009 to everybody. -- Regards, Man Shankar <man.ee.gen(at)gmail.com>
