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!
dwm for anything other than gaming. no close competition imho
Why would you use dwm for floating windows?
oops
dwm’s so good. It has pretty much everything one would need and once you’ve set it up, no need to change anything.
What about dwm makes it a more appealing choice compared to XMonad? (Excluding the C vs Haskell argument)
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)
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!
Does XMonad have a master-slave layout?
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.
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.
What you are describing for the
master-slevelayout 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:
XMonad.Layout.Tabbedresults in a stack-like layout.