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18 Jun 2006
About a week ago, I was geeking out over E17 on my newly installed Ubuntu installation. Then I found a window manager which was even more slick, though very light in the eye candy department: wmii, which apparently stands for 'Window Manager Improved II'.
It's an unusual in that it's a dynamic window manager, which means that it arranges your windows for you, rather than making you drag and resize them to make the best use of the space. When you open a window, it fills the screen. If you open another, it is tiled below the existing window. You can also make a new column, which splits the screen vertically and places the second window next to the first. There is also a 'stacking' mode, where the unfocussed windows have just their title bar visible and you can flip through them with a keyboard shortcut, a 'maximum' mode where all windows are maximized, and a 'floating' layer for applications like music players which have non-standard windows.
Instead of the familiar Linux workspace metaphor, there are tags, which allow you to group your windows into views (so you can have browser windows in one view, terminals in another, etc.).
The best thing about wmii is that it is completely scriptable, and you can use any scripting language installed on your machine (including Ruby---yay!), and it can be entirely keyboard driven. It's rather like having screen for your X11 applications. It's so light that it absolutely screams on my old Emperor, and everything feels really snappy.
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by Jonathan Briggs @ 19/06/2006 6:07 pm • Permalink •
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I switched to wmii from Ion last weekend, having used ion constantly for the last three years or so.
Like you, the thing that really attracts me to wmii is the scriptability in any language (and yes, in particular ruby). Probably the worst thing about Ion (IMHO) is its (exclusive) use of lua as its scripting/config language, which was just horrible. Horrible, I say! As well as that, it wasn't terribly well documented, and Tuomo (the guy behind it) is a bit scary if you don't agree with him.
The tags/views thing in wmii is ok, but I don't think it's the killer for me - the scriptability is. One thing Ion does seem to do better (though I might change my mind about this with more time/exploration) is how it handles non-tiling situations. Some clients (classic example is the Gimp) don't fit into the tiling model well, and Ion has "float workspaces" for this purposes, which work really well - just like a conventional position-it-yourself window manager. I haven't quite got that working nicely in wmii yet. But I suspect that's my problem...
I'm 99% sure I won't be going back - put it that way.
by Andy Gimblett @ 13/07/2006 1:08 pm • Permalink •
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In reply to Andy, you do know about Alt-Shift-Space to make windows float, right?
As for the Gimp, I actually find that it works rather well with wmii when tiled. I create one small column with tools and other dialogs, and one large column with images.
by Constantine Evans @ 14/07/2006 10:07 pm • Permalink •
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I just moved from ion too. Wmii seems quite slick so far. It's half a year since you wrote this, what are your feelings about it now? Are you still using it? What things annoy you and what couldn't you live without?
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I'd also be interested to know if you're still with wmii. I've been using it for perhaps 18 months now, having first moved to wmi from ratpoison.
I don't know enough to really take advantage of the scripting side of things, though that might change in the future. For me, it's been the sheer speed of use. wmii seems to have the best thought-out default keybindings and behaviour, and by largley sorting out window size and positions for me I can get a very rapid workflow going when I'm in the right mood 
by Mark Gibbens @ 01/01/2007 10:56 am • Permalink •
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rjs and Mark Gibbens: I could have sword that I'd written a reply to rjs, but obviously something went awry somewhere
Anyway, what I thought I'd said in the missing comment is that, since wmii is on my old PC laptop that I use intensively for only about 3 weeks a year, I still haven't really had time to bed in with it. I still love the minimalism and keyboard-centred approach, but then I also love the shinyness of the Mac GUI. As such, the biggest problem is switching my mindset (and it's associated muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts!) from one to the other.
If I ever save enough money to buy a MacBook and Parallels, I'm going to install Debian or Ubuntu on it and run wmii virtualized. Then I won't have the disincentive of hauling out my old and slow laptop just to play with wmii.
by bsag @ 01/01/2007 12:55 pm • Permalink •
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I installed wmii a couple of days ago, and I am fascinated by the way it can manage the windows around. I also tried dwm , as I need no configurability, and its like wmii without the plan9 pseudo fs, and with no configuration at all. Oh you can actually edit the source to configure :D. What made me change back is that wmii's keyboard shortcuts simply makes more sense.
I'm not satisfied with one thing though, if you work with one tag for a while then it takes a few sec to switch to another. Perhaps the other is cleared from some cache or I donno. If you switch between them regularly it's fast..
by Paul Sonkoly @ 07/02/2007 7:52 pm • Permalink •
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You might like Ion too.
Super minimalist window management with Tabs.
by Raj Patel @ 19/06/2006 1:07 am • Permalink •