Tiling window managers

[Dilawar Singh]

Tiling window manger (TWM) can be very effective on large screen. Some advantages for developers (or disadvantages for heavy mouse users) are following:

- Makes keyboard the primary input device. As a programmer, keyboard is your primary weapon and switching back and forth to mouse is wastage of time.
- Makes terminal the primary interface. This is incredible useful for heavy user of vim/screen/tmux etc.
- Utilises the space provided by large screen effectively. Makes it very easy to see multiple windows at the same time. Think of plotting/updating a graph after every run of simulation.
- Minimizes CPU usage by disabling fancy graphics.

There is a  learning curve. You need to memorize/or learn useful commands. It could also cause headache sometime since often used applets may not be available e.g. nm-applet. Anyway, with time and patience, these can be put into your configuration.

I've used following TWM

- dwm (dynamic window manager). Very lightweight and safe. The customization has to be done in source code only (which is C) .

- Awesome. More popular. Quite a large user base. Currently using it and quiet happy with it. The default configuration and pretty good. The wiki is well documented with quite a lot of examples. Scripted via Lua.

- XMONAD. Haskell based. Only for "Haskell/functional" nerds. Very stable and fast but needs whole Haskell environment to build the binary.

- i3. Another choice, as good as awesome WM. But if you have become accustomed to awesome, you may not like the key-bindings provided by i3 (and vice versa).

Some desktop-manager such kde/gnome may even allow integration of TWM. I've has success in the past with XFCE4, and JWM with awesome/dwm. It used this combination on Puppy-Linux( Fatdog, 64bit ) which I keep on a pendrive.

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Dilawar
NCBS Bangalore

[Prashant Sohani]

Not to mention, Emacs has some simple hotkeys to split and manage the available area as 'windows'; and its various modes can transform each window into useful applets; ranging from code editor (duh), file browser, email client, calculator, shell prompt, or even Tetris.
It's not useful for everything, of course; but can be good enough for a surprisingly large number of things.

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Prashant Sohani
Systems Software Engineer, NVIDIA
Regional Co-ordinator for RMO,
Maharashtra & Goa Region

[Harsh Gupta]

I use i3, if you are comfortable with vim key bindings you can get started with right after you install it. TWM's are pretty awesome if you use more than one monitor.