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Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

Off-topic, why did you switch from xmonad to i3?

Not a deal breaker but Xmonad brings a large dependency (1GB+ is the price of Haskell) where most TWMs on Linux are in comparison laughably lightweight and blazing fast.

For me i3 strikes the sweetspot of dead simple config, incredible feature set, and performance. This after coming from Awesome WM where I found myself spending way too much time tweaking Lua script to get things pixel perfect, which you basically get out of the box for free with i3.

This gives the false impression that xmonad is not as fast as other twms. Xmonad is very lightweight, the package is below 500kb, which is below i3 and awesome. It has a very minimal and clean interface. The configuration file IS the twm (similar to DWM) xmonad is just a library. You write your WM which might be a turnoff for users that don't want to spend the time doing so.

Since xmonad is a Haskell library, you need the compiler. There's a reason why ghc is so big compared to other compilers, but just because it is a big dependency, it doesn't make xmonad any less lightweight

Yes, it only a really major inconvenient if you have very very limited HD space, which is a rare thing these days. And you can always uninstall ghc after configuring xmonad.

> This after coming from Awesome WM where I found myself spending way too much time tweaking Lua script to get things pixel perfect, [...]

This is why I use dwm, because I don't know C and thus I can't configure it, and thus I use what I have and use the time I'd spend to configure it to do other things. Another reason is that I can just check it in to my dotfiles.

Are you implying xmonad is slow?

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