Ionizing

[kerravonsen]

Well, I've been spending the last few days getting totally geeky about window managers...

...which of course folks in the MS-Windows world will go and say "Huh? What's a window manager?". For them the question is irrelevant because, while they do have a window manager, they have no choice about it; they can only ever have one and only one window manager, so it's just part of the furniture. Their eyes will probably glaze over at the mention of virtual workspaces, virtual desktops, sticky windows, dock applications, key bindings, floating versus framed windows, but that's what I've been diving into.

One could blame it on my laptop. I changed window managers on my laptop to one which reduced the use of the mouse, seeing as it's much more convenient when one is sitting in the bus typing, to not have to use the touchpad at all (annoying little thing, though I guess one of those red knobs in the middle of the keyboard would be an even more annoying and much littler thing) -- when not in the bus I can use a proper trackball, but there's nowhere to balance it while on the bus. The first was Ratpoison, which was good for a while, but had some annoyances in its limitations. Then I tried Ion (version 1) and it was definitely better, though still with some annoying limitations; good enough for the laptop, but useless for the desktop. The idea behind both of these was to eliminate the placement of windows altogether, and declare there was no such thing as a background -- windows simply took up all the space available, and didn't float around, they were anchored to the edges of the screen. Windows were on virtual workspaces that could be flipped between with a couple of keystrokes. With Ion this was improved by being able to split the workspace into frames (as many splits as you like, and a different set for each workspace). Each window was anchored to its particular frame (though you could move them between frames if you wanted to) However useful this was for things like consoles and editors which were one-window affairs, things got annoying for applications like The Gimp which has several windows open at once, expecting them to be side by side in a normal "floating" work area.

However, then I came upon Ion2, the current stable version of Ion, which has addressed this problem by combining itself with the PWM window manager (an earlier window manager written by the same author) to enable some workspaces to be "floating" workspaces, where "normal" window behaviour applies. It was supposed to have a "dock" module, but I couldn't get it to work. However, it was nice enough that I became restless and not content with the window manager I was using on my desktop, so I went on a window-manager pub-crawl, downloading and trying one after another, trying to find that elusive "perfect" window manager.

After all that, I wrote down a long list of what I really wanted in a computer working environment, and realized that I could get what I wanted if I combined a "normal" window manager with Ion inside an Xnest window (don't worry, is long technogeeky stuff)

However the next day I figured out how to get the "dock" module in Ion to work (which was the one thing I was missing -- something which would have a small section of the screen with the same applications there all the time, no matter what virtual workspace was showing), and now I have a lovely setup with customized key bindings to help my navigation, and lots and lots of terminals, a gkrellm and a couple of music apps sitting on the left, one workspace dedicated to the browser, and another for the "floating" applications like Gimp. And of course I also figured out how to apply my own "rainbow" colour-scheme setup to it; I did that early on.

Whether this is good enough to use for work I shall see, as I was setting it up at work yesterday.

Comments

[mistraltoes.livejournal.com]

This is very amusing, because while you've been getting geeky over window managers, I've been using pretty much identical means to evaluate PIMs--download stuff, test stuff, make a list of desired features, realize I'm going to have to combine two.... Yep, pretty much the same. Though of course a personal information manager is much less technical than a window manager, the coincidence of timing and methods still strikes me as hysterical. [g]