Sure, you can pick any 'modern' wm and try to configure it to meet your needs, probably work around some missing functionality with xbindkeys and/or xdotool, but fvwm is unique and you probably didn't mention some things which are essential for your workflow because you will only realize they were there when they will suddenly not work the way you expect them to in a modern window manager.
Literarily every other window manager seemed to lack this or that functionality, what I missed the most was keybindings contexts and conditional window placement. I only had one bug with dynamic menu, didn't notice when it's gone.
It did not crash a single time, so fvwm-devel or fvwm-unstable is pretty useable on desktop. I'm using the development branch for about two years now, AFAIR since 2.6.28 and testing other WM/DE now and then out of curiosity, and so far: If you search for awesome + Lua on sites like Github, you'll find loads of users' configs and use some of their enhancements. You can have a look at some screenshots on awesome wiki. In the configuration files, you can define both simple and sophisticated functions that reference the whole current WM state, including properties of currently active window, visible tags, widgets etc. The former ensures that the core is really fast, the later enables you to easily interact with all the properties of your desktop. (But since most lightweight WMs are fast, you'd probably need a really old hardware to feel the benefits.)Īwesome is written in C and lua. Great performance is due to the fact that awesome is built on top of Xcb library instead of the old Xlib. The two most striking properties of awesome are its speed and flexibility. If you have any trouble defining this behavior, let me know and I'll help you out. You can define the action for any mouse button + modifier keys combinations, in the scope of a window, widget or globally. Make any number of tags be viewed at once,Īssociate an application with a certain tag, so that it will always open on that tag, even if it isn't currently viewed (think for instance opening a browser in the background, without loosing sight of your terminal or whatever),ĭefine a default layout for each tag - there are a number of layouts possible, including floating (the "typical" window behavior), several tiling schemes, maximized (each window gets maximized) and fullscreen. Make a single window appear on any number of tags at the same time, Yes+ - awesome actually re-defines virtual desktops and calls them "tags". Also, I thought I could share my own insights on using it. Sardathrion has already mentioned Awesome WM, but without referring to the features mentioned in the question. I don't use any desktop environment, just plain X11. The move/resize operations should begin on mouse-down and end on mouse-up.
#Better window manager alternatives windows
Multiple virtual desktops that I can switch between with the keyboard and that I can move windows between. I.e., if I drag the mouse into a window which is partially obscured, that window gains focus but does not come to the front. Thus, I'm wondering if there is a more modern window manager which has the following properties (these are the key things I like about FVWM and would like to keep):įocus-follows-mouse without auto-raise. I realize that 2.6.0 just came out a few days ago, and ironically that is what reminded me to look into a replacement - while a new stable version is good, it took so long (4 years between 2.4.20 and 2.6.0, and 2 years between 2.4.19 and 2.4.20) that I'm still unconfident in FVWM's future. I've been using FVWM for over a decade, and for some time I've been concerned that the window manager is dying a slow death.
0 kommentar(er)
