Window Managers

X11

The one after will be:

• i3, saner wmii
• awesome, dwm on stereoids

My next window manager will be one of:

• Openbox — eye-candy capable, window oriented
• PekWM (?)
• wmii or dwm or awesome — tiling, minimalist, tagging
• xmonad with xmobar — looks promising, but is Haskell, which really hurts it’s usefulness

Related stuff:

• orthos — replaces xdm/gdm/kdm/…
• dzen — advanced, pluggable, dynamic status bar and menu
• dmenu — simplistic menus
• Ruby-IXP
• wmii+ruby
• wmii+ruby freebsd plugin
• wmii config and stuff
• conky, visibility, docker, …
• ipager
• keynav

Unrelated stuff to try:

• MPD to replace xmms and esd remoting

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The perfect WM:

• Non-dogmatical
• Good tiling mode (wmii style)
• Good floating windows mode (openbox)
• Support all standards and known hacks
• Support dock apps in some way
• Support broken apps like unicode-rxvt
• Sane focus handling (pointer follows focus, no focus stealing)
• Sane window placement (no focus stealing, predictable placement, minimal overlap)

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Windows

My next Windows desktop environment at work might be one of:

• Emerge Desktop
• GeoShell
• LDE(X)
• LightStep
• Sharp Environment
• bbLean / bbClean
• Cameo based on bbLean
• dwm-win32

My next Windows window manager at work might be one of:

• WinSplit
• WindowSizer 20$
• Gridmove
• bug.n AutoHotKeys based dwm

Windows Utilities:

• XKeymacs
• MinMaxExtender

MacOS X

Basic keyboard based solutions:

• ShiftIt, OSS, keyboard based resizing left/right/bottom/top/full/corners
• SizeUp, 13$, keyboard based resizing left/right/bottom/top/full/corners, identical to ShiftIt (blog)
• splitscreen, ?, keyboard based resizing left/right/full, subset of ShiftIt

More advanced, generic solutions:

• Breeze, 8$, keyboard based resizing, template based, generic superset of splitscreen et al
• Optimal Layout, 14$, mouse and keyboard based resizing to any grid, supports templates, manual keyboard resizing, pairwise resizing, potential superset of all the contenders
• Arrange, 7$, keyboard and mouse based resizing to grid, freeform templates, potential superset of splitscreen et al
• Divvy, 14$, mouse and keyboard based resizing to 6x6 grid, slightly cumbersome (2 keypresses or clicks req’d), generic superset of splitscreen et al

Out of competition:

• Finder Window Manager, ?, heavily Finder oriented
• Cinch, 7$, mouse based snapping left/right/full

To do:

• which meaningfully support multiple monitors?
• which have meaningful solutions for new window placement?
• try trial versions of advanced solutions

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