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*NIX: Window Managers and Terminals

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ewemoa:
Had been using dwm and st for a bit, but due to not figuring out a good way to maintain my local installations of them, decided to look for alternatives.

After trying a few alternatives, came across and temporarily settled on i3 and lilyterm.

On the window manager front, was looking for:

- ability to use the Windows key as a modifier for window manager commands
- configurability without having to recompile source
- tiling support (as well as at least some support for floating)
- focus-follows-mouse support
- ability to support some form of "bar" (e.g. for indicating workspace / tag names, display time, etc.)
- multiple screen support
- ability to have certain windows start up on specific workspaces (or be tagged automatically)

Basically something like dwm, except for the aforementioned issue.  echinus came close but I encountered a few issues that kept me looking.

On the terminal front, was looking for:

- dark background by default
- scrollback buffer (along with decent size) by default
- multilingual support
- easy configuration

Tried xterm, uxterm, and mlterm.  terminator might be a good alternative, but didn't try it long enough.


Any favorites and/or recommendations?


For reference, i3 has a Google TechTalk, decent docs, an irc channel, mailing lists,  stackoverflow-like (askbot) support.

Edvard:
Been using Xfce since the 2.something days.  Something about it, I keep coming back to.
Never got into tiling window managers.  I can see the attractiveness, but it just never clicked with me.  I tried i3, as you suggested in IRC, but it's the same with that as other TWM's.  Too long with floating windows, I guess, though I appreciate i3's ability to toggle floating windows.

My go-to terminal is the standard Xfce4-terminal just because it's there whenever I install Xfce, though I have used LXTerm with OpenBox, which is very nice.  On boxes that have to be minimal, I go with Urxvt.  I've heard a lot of good things about Terminator, though I haven't tried it.

40hz:
Been using Xfce since the 2.something days.  Something about it, I keep coming back to.
Never got into tiling window managers.
-Edvard (June 29, 2013, 03:04 AM)
--- End quote ---

Ditto. Xfce just hits the sweet spot for me. Not too much or too little.

On a semi-related topic this has got to be the absolute best RDP client I've ever worked with. Better even than Microsoft's own remote client running under Win7 when accessing Windows servers.

Now I can RDP out to a W2k3/8 server and reliably do 'my thing' without having to exit Linux first.

Awesome! :Thmbsup:

ewemoa:
I still use Xfce occasionally, but the mostly-not-having-to-spend-time-arranging-windows aspect has been quite helpful for certain workflows and that's not something I've figured out how to do well in Xfce.  Now if I could just figure out why the external display here is recognized sometimes as VGA1 and sometimes as VGA2...

GridMove noteI would have been a GridMove user if I had the discipline to figure out its configuration :)

On a side note, I think Gothi[c] mentioned that fluxbox could be configured to do tiling in a manner similar to dwm, i3, and the like.  May be I'll give that a try one of these days.


Hadn't seen Remmina.  Thanks for the tip!

ewemoa:
Now using fluxbox, thanks to Gothi[c]'s tiling patch (ArrangeWindowsStack*).

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