Window Managers
Jan. 16 2023
My experiments with virtual machines and Window Managers for the past year has provided some insight into the way that I like to interface with my desktop. For quite a while now I have used the XFCE Desktop Environment, and it works well for me, but I think a stand alone WM may be a better fit. Some of the reasons I've come to this conclusion follow.
My preference for a desktop background is a darker solid color; photographs or graphic design images are nice but they are not completely visible when application windows are open and if no applications are open it's time to shutdown. I don't make much use of a task switcher/window button area because I use the keyboard shortcut Alt+Tab for switching applications and I really prefer a window list called up by a keyboard shortcut or a click on the desktop to view open windows on the other desktops. Instead of clicking on a virtual desktop pager, I use the Ctl+Alt+Arrow Keys to switch virtual desktops. Being able to call up an application menu near the cursor location is much more convienent than mousing to a button in a corner of the screen. If an application is used frequently I will generally create a new keyboard shortcut and skip launching from the menu anyway, then I only need to open a menu to launch applications that I use occasionally. As for the system tray, using a conky instance configured as a panel, I can display information about uptime, cpu activity, ram usage, network up/down activity, a clock, the date, and battery status. While a DE can be adapted to work this way, it is a bit overkill when a stand alone WM tends to operate like this using fewer resources, making a DE and its native taskbar/panel kind of superfluous.
The four main WM's I've gravitated to are Openbox, Fluxbox, JWM, and cwm. Others that I tried liked are twm, ctwm, i3, and flwm but I keep coming back to the main four. Lately I have been leaning strongly toward cwm, also known as the Calm Window Manager, provided by the OpenBSD project.