My journey into tiling window managers – Xmonad

For over a year now I have used Openbox as my only window manager in Linux. It is lightweight, stable, easily customizable and fast, yet somehow I was interested in something new.

Xmonad is the first tiling manager that I installed. I chose Xmonad because it seems to be the most popular out of them all. It has great documentation and community.

Switching to something new almost always takes a lot of time. This was no exception. At first Xmonad seemed very complicated if I compare it to Openbox, because to do anything you must have a configuration file, which is pretty heavy. Yet this configuration files is what makes this window manager so good.

After following the guided tour I realised that Xmonad is very simple and straightforward. The key to work efficiently in a tiling window manager is to know the keyboard shortcuts to move around. Mouse is not needed. Also the default key bindings are easily memorable and comfortable.

There are two types of windows – tiling and floating.

• Tiling windows are the ones that tile on a single workspace. They are put and maximized together with each other and no free desktop space is wasted.
• Floating are the ones that ‘float’ or in other words – are on top of everything. They can be freely moved and resized, just like in other standard window managers.

This means that all windows are close together and on the same level in the workspace, they can’t overlap each other. Although this seems great, sometimes it becomes irritating, if you need a fixed-size window. However, nothing that configuration file can’t fix.

Another thing I like about Xmonad is the behavior with multiple monitors. Instead of a large workspace covering two monitors, I have two separate workspaces – each on every monitor. This idea seemed to me fresh and something new. Although weird at first, but later I realized that it is better.

Since Xmonad is only a window manager it means that there are no status bars/panels and trays, so if you want them they need to be installed additionally. Coming from Openbox, this wasn’t new to me and didn’t cause any problems. Xmobar seems a great for a status bar and stalonetray – for  system tray.

So if I summarize all the pro’s and con’s:

Pro’s

• fast
• efficient for managing many open windows, especially terminals
• minimal – no wasted space, no window decorations, no buttons
• massive configuration possibilities – layouts for workspaces, concrete application behavior
• large module libraries for configuration
• everything is keyboard oriented - no need of a mouse
• growing community

Con’s

• A learning curve
• Takes time to get used to, if you are not familiar with tiling window managers
• Configuration is not so easy and straightforward for advanced usage

Series Navigation

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Tags: arch, discoveries, linux, window managers, xmonad

This entry was posted on November 25th, 2009 and is filed under linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.