You are the WM

[krupan]

"You are the WM" until you automate everything with scripts as the author seems to have done (because, why wouldn't you automate?). Then it's "You just wrote your own WM, in bash."

I'm tempted to try this because it's just so UNIXy, but I probably have "better" ("important" and less fun) things to spend time on.

[zeveb]

Pretty neat idea, but I'm beginning to think that Greenspun's Eleventh Law should be 'All powerful Unix environments will expand to include an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden subset of Plan 9.'

[an_ko]

Zeveb's Eleventh Law; you heard it here first.

[ims]

I like minimalism, but IMO the closest you can get to this idea without wasting time reinventing the wheel is a tiling windows manager. I have been using i3 for about 3 years now and can't imagine going back.

[mdcox]

Just switched to OSX for work, and i3 is the only part of my workflow I can't replace. I dearly dearly miss it.

[catern]

Initially I thought this was based on wmctrl[0] which is a nice piece of software. It allows you to do some fancy window manager scripting in bash, even when running GNOME Shell.

[0]: http://linux.die.net/man/1/wmctrl

[bitwize]

It's written against an obsolete windowing model for a deprecated window system.

What's needed is a successor written as a Wayland compositor and tools that communicate via a d-bus interface to instruct the compositor where to place the windows.

[vezzy-fnord]

What's needed is a successor written as a Wayland compositor and tools that communicate via a d-bus interface to instruct the compositor where to place the windows.

Poe's Law really has me here.

[JTxt]

Handy.

In case this is useful to others:

I have to use Windows 7 at work. I recently found bug.n, a flexible tiling window manager made with AutoHotkey.

https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n

[kbenson]

Or you can just run FVWM2, and get everything offered here (including the fine grain control), plus a bunch of goodies for theming, window decoration, window buttons, pagers, virtual desktops, button panels, etc.

[halosghost]

Okay, so I know I'm a little odd, but my immediate reaction to this:

“Oh snap! I should totally uninstall my WM!”

[mavhc]

I'm not surprised people hate window managers when they all suck and don't even have basic features RISC OS had in 1990

[cookiecaper]

What features? I've never used RISC OS.

[trengrj]

I'm a big fan of z3bra's posts. They focus on the unix way, minimalism, and understand your tools.

Another good link is http://blog.z3bra.org/2014/03/toolbox.html where he describes some unusual but useful commands.

[nickpsecurity]

A nice illustration of the UNIX philosophy applies to window managers. Also, a nice illustration of why non-UNIX IPC or protected procedures are much more efficient.

[teddyh]

For less extreme cases, you can also use xwit(1).

[INTPenis]

I was forced to be minimal 10 years ago with my laptop having 256M RAM. This WM would have been my choice then. Instead I used Ion3 after trying my way through many others like ratpoison, waimea and so forth.

But now I have 8-16G or more RAM in my computers. I also tend to have a nice graphics chip, even if it's from Intel it's better than what I had 10 years ago. So why bother with this type of minimalism if you don't need it?

[mcguire]

I recently switched back to xmonad and then ratpoison because I'm more interested in getting work done than watching the pretty animations.

[mahouse]

I read VM in the title. Very disappointed.

[vezzy-fnord]

You certainly can be the VM on a microkernel which supports external pagers.

[iguessthislldo]

I did too and I've read this post before...

[cetra3]

How does this compare to XMonad?