this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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What is your favourite floating window manager? (self.linux)
submitted 8 months ago by MigratingtoLemmy to c/[email protected]
38 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Hi there, I'm looking at floating window mangers as an in-between of DEs and escaping configuration hell (somewhat) of tiling Window Managers.

Specifically, I was looking at IceWM and OpenBox, but would love recommendations and discussion on what you like and why.

Cheers!

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago (4 children)

The best one was enlightenment DR16, but it has been discontinued.

It gave the option to remember the position of the first window per application and per a criteria you could set. Like "remember I want the Window titled Calendar from class calendar on the right of the screen".

Each theme would bring a set of different border styles and you could change them from the title bar menu and have it remember that. It was very easy to customize themes. The borders could have transparent sections, eg. your theme could have the window title in a bubble floating a few pixels away from the window.

Windows could be stickied, so when you switch virtual desktops, the calendar would follow.

It had pagers to show what's going on on other virtual desktops, so you could see when your downloads finished even if the program didn't use notifications.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm pretty sure KDE's window manager, kwin, can do all of those things through kwin scripts and window rules, except the pager doesn't show the details of windows on other desktops, just the outline.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

In e16 this were just a few clicks. It were GUI options.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

This sounds amazing!!! Too bad it's gone...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

This was a fun one! Now, I use Gnome, after I discontinued my own fork of catwm called ocelot (but this was a tiling wm based on dwm, anyway).

[–] SinningStromgald 2 points 8 months ago

This sounds like my dream windows manager but it's dead. Happiest and saddest news.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

fvwm is super-old-school but incredibly flexible.

[–] MigratingtoLemmy 1 points 8 months ago

Thanks, I'll try this. I think with a bit of config and a better theme this would be great

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I use glazier, a WM I wrote myself. But given your description, it won't fit you at all ^^ It's very bare bones, and requires that you script everything not mouse driven using wmutils.

[–] MigratingtoLemmy 3 points 8 months ago

Ah, like bspwm then.

If I was younger, I'd jump on the idea to be able to configure everything to my liking and making a "perfect" setup. However, I want to reach a compromise between a lean system and something which has sane defaults OOTB. Your setup seems fantastic but it's going to take me a week or so, which is not what I want to do. Thank you for mentioning your project though.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Try pop_os. It's gnome tiling can be enabled and disabled from the top bar and it's defaults are sane and easy to change.

[–] MigratingtoLemmy 1 points 8 months ago

Thanks, but I'm trying to avoid DEs for the most part. I'll keep this in mind though

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

OpenBox & Xfwm. I'm keeping an eye on labwc, which is a new openbox clone for wlroots. It's already suitable for everyday use.

[–] MigratingtoLemmy 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Thanks for the suggestions. Do you think I can get away with running just xfwm4 instead of the entire XFCE DE? I'm trying to stay light, which is why I would like to avoid DEs for the most part.

Isn't labwc just a compositor?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

You'll also want a root window and other essential features. This is provided by xfdesktop4 (or you can use an equivalent from another DE). You can use just the window manager if you want but you won't like it. Or you can use something like Openbox which includes everything needed (it's a tiny complete DEs not just a window manager).

[–] MigratingtoLemmy 1 points 8 months ago

Thanks, I'm looking at OpenBox, IceWM and FWM for now. I believe there are some other niche floating window managers too, but after attempting to configure ratpoison a while back (after which I realised that it was no longer supported) I don't want to configure as much for a WM to work.

[–] vector_zero 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I've run plain ol' openbox without a desktop environment on top of it, and it's quite nice. IIRC I also had a standalone status bar application, but I can't remember which one I used.

There are a couple utility programs (obconf and obkey?) that help to configure everything comfortably.

[–] MigratingtoLemmy 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Ah, I thought that xfwm4 wouldn't work without XFCE, but I'm wrong. This is a good idea, thanks a bunch! I'll have to look at panels/status-bars and see what I like. I'm not really one to configure GUI so this might be a learning curve

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

xfwm4 could work w/o Xfce, though I doubt that it would be worth the effort to script the missing bits by hand. Xfce is pretty modular; once you turn off the tracker/indexer, and whatever useless package manager gui the distro may have included (e.g., 'dnfdragora'), it's pretty lightweight. You can also turn off the compositor. The stock xfce4-panel is also miles ahead (IMHO) of various independent panel programs, both in functionality, as well as looks -- and its widgets are also entirely modular.

labwc is a window manager in the vein of openbox; I guess under wayland a window manager has to be a compositor too (?); but it's no different from sway in this regard.

There's also wayfire; which is a bit more beefy, and aims to preserve all the compiz plugins. Some of those are notorious for being silly eye candy (windows that burn down on close; wobbly windows, etc.) but others are pretty useful (esp. those that emulate the exposé view from OS X; pinning/grouping windows, etc.) -- though in my experience it isn't as stable as labwc; which is understandable because it's a lot more complex.

[–] MigratingtoLemmy 1 points 8 months ago

Thanks for the comment. I haven't played around with XFCE enough, but it doesn't seem as light on resources in recent years as other, leaner WMs (that is to be expected, but XFCE is no longer the bastion of "DE with Low RAM usage" like it and LXDE were).

I'll look into the other options you mentioned. Thanks!

[–] a_good_hunter 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Awesome or Hikari. Depends on X11 vs Wayland.

[–] MigratingtoLemmy 1 points 8 months ago

Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

For X, I'd probably go for Openbox. For Wayland, I have tried Hikari, but it reminded me why I don't like floating window managers, so I don't use it, but it seems really cool! Also, there is labwc which is supposed to be an Openbox replacement for Wayland, but I can't tell you anything about it cuz I haven't tried it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

This stick I use so that my window doesn't slam closed

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

dwm for anything other than gaming. no close competition imho

[–] PelagiusSeptim 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Why would you use dwm for floating windows?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

oops

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

What about dwm makes it a more appealing choice compared to XMonad? (Excluding the C vs Haskell argument)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

i dont have much experience with xmonad but i tried every wm at some point. usually the things that keep me with dwm is that i found a build with very sane defaults and a number of patches i appreciate like swallowing, fake fullscreen(so you can fullscreen a program inside the assigned window) or xresources/pywal integration . i also love the scratchpad implementation and the tag system with a tag 0. i also like dwmblocks for the status bar . now im sure some of this features are available on other wm but i never found all of them in one like on DWM.

i also use ST as terminal and it works great with dwm while it gives me issues with other WM(usually resizing issues)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

XMonad has most of the features you've listed though: window swallowing, fake fullscreen (other solutions exist: tabbed layout, fullscreen...), xresources (other solutions exist, just not familiar of them tbh), scratchpad, tags, taffybar and many more features in xmonad-contrib!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Does XMonad have a master-slave layout?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Do you have an image at hand that showcases that layout? The only images I am finding from a little DDG'ing are similar to XMonad's XMonad.Layout.ThreeColumns, but I am not sure if that is what you are looking for.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Master-slave layout essentially splits your screen into just two windows. Any new window opening gets automatically assigned as the new master and other windows get demoted to slave and moved down the stack.

I also quite like the stack layout dwm offers. It allows me to navigate through my windows with just up and down keys instead of left/right + up/down.

I've looked for dwm alternatives before but haven't found anything that does everything dwm does. XMonad is interesting but seems daunting to set up (also Haskell)

EDiT: A quick search tells me that you can indeed have a master-slave layout on XMonad.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

What you are describing for the master-sleve layout can be achieved with either, XMonad.Layout.Grid or Tall layout (more likely, other ways to achieve this).

The stack layout on the other hand can be achieved through the XMonad.Layout.Accordion? And if you are not a fan of that you could always refer to the XMonad.Layout.Tabbed.

Extra:

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

dwm's so good. It has pretty much everything one would need and once you've set it up, no need to change anything.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I suggest jwm!

[–] MigratingtoLemmy 2 points 8 months ago

Thanks, I'll take a look

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

The Xfce one. I don't see the point of simple WM for floating windows. I use a WM because it is the only solution for a proper tiling window manager.