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Hi, |
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|
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Man Shankar wrote: |
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> Hello, |
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> |
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> I want to try out the tiling window managers. I would want to know the |
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> experiences of the users about awesome and xmonad. Primarily i would |
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> like to know which of those two tiling WMs has worked for you guys. The |
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> hurdles you encountered and the gains you got thereof. |
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> |
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> Currently i am a happy e16 user, but the fact that the tiling WMs |
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> "manage" the windows makes me attracted to them. Please comment. |
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> |
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|
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I switched from e16 to xmonad last summer and haven't regret it so far. |
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One important thing though is to get used to the tiling paradigm, i.e. |
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letting the wm do all the resize and positioning work. I suggest you try |
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it some time and see if it fits you. |
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Personally I started using it only on my home pc while I kept e16 on the |
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laptop for work until I couldn't resist a complete switch to it anymore. |
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|
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I've recently also started using awesome in a few virtual machines, |
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mainly due to the large size of the xmonad dependencies (GHC takes up |
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quite some space). |
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From my point of view they both look fairly the same with awesome having |
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a few more features (tagging, widgets). |
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|
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It also helps to regard the configuration file (xmonad and >= |
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awesome-3.0) as the main program, e.g. my xmonad.hs looks a bit like a |
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Haskell program where different modules get imported and the main window |
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manager module loaded at the end. |
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You can do quite a lot with those two. |
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|
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Aside from that, the main difference between them are the programming |
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languages they're written in because you have to use it for the |
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configuration file. |
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Awesome uses Lua which is a simple but powerful imperative scripting |
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language and xmonad uses Haskell, an advanced functional programming |
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language which many consider as rather hard to learn. |
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|
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Personally, I didn't know anything about Haskell before using xmonad and |
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I have to admit that I had a few very hard times with it when I wanted |
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to do some advanced (or even simple) configuration changes. But once you |
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wind your head around the functional paradigm (and all those operators |
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and monads) you can do a lot with it. |
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Have a look at the xmonad config archive[1] for some examples. |
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|
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If you're going to use awesome I'd recommend having a look at |
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x11-misc/dmenu as I didn't see any default integration of it in the |
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awesome config (though I might have missed it). |
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|
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Regards, |
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Andi |
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|
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[1] http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive |
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