[olug] The Joys of WindoMaker

Eric Pierce eric_olug at yahoo.com
Sat Sep 7 08:33:52 UTC 2002


I used WindowMaker for my 'introductory' year into
Linux.  It's fantastic and the newer versions (=>0.80)
never crashed once on me.

Just out of curiousity though I tried out IceWM a few
months back, and I must say I like it a bit better
than WMaker for my 333Mhz laptop.
Here's a few cool things.
1.  Smaller memory footprint (about 2~3 MB smaller
than Wmaker)
2.  Anti-aliased text support in menus/title bars/etc.
3.  Starts up noticably quicker than WMaker (again
333Mhz, etc.)
4.  Arguably better theme support - Here's a goodie
(http://themes.freshmeat.net/screenshots/27711/)
5.  Keybinding support is at least as good as WMakers
(hate that mouse)
6.  Do you use '<crtl><alt>L/R arrows' to switch
workspaces?  You don't?  Er... anyway you can
'<crtl><alt><shift>L/R arrows' to easily move apps to
different workspaces.  Does WMaker have this
keybinding?
7.  The 'IceDock' program lets you run WMapps under
IceWM
8.  Has never crashed on me

I'm not trying to start a window manager flame war
either.  I'm just as happy as the next camper that
there's such a fantastic variety of high quality
window managers available under Linux... especially in
regards to lower spec machines.

My 2 bits,
Eric

--- Mike Hostetler <thehaas at binary.net> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 05, 2002 at 10:01:02PM -0500, Quinn
> Coldiron wrote:
> > Not to start a desktop war, but actually, my
> favorite is Windowmaker,
> > then XFCE is a close second.  Something about
> Windowmaker just keeps me
> > coming back.  It's clean, fast and elegant.  I
> installed Ximian to get
> > the sweet icons and pixmaps.  A bit of a pig just
> for icons I guess :-) 
> 
> I just recently went back to WindowMaker after about
> a year in Ximian/GNOME
> world.  It's a great setup (for me, at least) and is
> not a hog in memory
> like GNOME is.  Just I still have GNOME libs
> installed to run Evolution and a
> few other GNOME apps that I like.
> 
> But, since I last used WindowMaker, they seemed to
> have taken away the
> WMPrefs app.  What is now the "official" WM
> configuration program
> (besides "vi on the config files =)? 
> 
> > Now that I have the /usr/share/pixmaps directory
> and subs burned to a
> > CDROM I don't need it anymore...
> 
> That's a really, really good idea . . . .
> 
> -- mikeh
>  
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