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Comment by iatanasov | Hacker News Reader

Interesting . But for me so far nothing gets even close to the beauty and symplicity of dwm (http://dwm.suckless.org )

I switched to xmonad (http://xmonad.org/), since you can change the layout per workspace and it doesn't include a bar. (Sure, you can turn it off in dwm, but where's the minimalism in that?)

And Xmonad is the only one that gets workspaces right in a multidisplay environment.

Not used Xmonad, but I've been saying for years Enlightenment (e17 and up) is the only window manager that lets use multiple virtual desktops (workspaces?) and physical monitors in a sane way; namely I can swap workspaces on one monitor without it effecting the other.

Gnome, KDE, LXDE, Mate, Cinnamon (and windows 10) all seem to assume that I'd only every be doing the same thing on both monitors which just seems inherently wrong.

macOS also gets multi-monitor right. It even gets it right if your monitors have different DPI.

There are three philosophies to deal with multiple workspaces and multiple monitors:

* one pool of WSs for all monitors (gnome,mate,win10)

* one shared pool of WSs for each monitor (xmonad)

* one pool of WSs for each monitor (awesome,dwm,e17)

So what xmonad has is one set of workspaces and each monitor can pick one from the shared pool! It's so great to have a WS dedicated for WWW on a side monitor and when something important comes up, I can bring that WS to the main monitor. Not easily done with the last idea.

Oh, very clever; I didn't realise there were 3 distinct behaviours. Options two and three seem to make sense; I find it hard to believe anyone actually wants type 1. I'll definitely have to have a play with xmonad now :)

i3 also has excellent monitor/virtual desktop support.

Part of the advantage for me is that dwm is written in C and pretty much it comes with no dependencies

I used DWM and derivatives (Awesome, etc) for some time but I didn't enjoy the automatic layouts. The split between primary and secondary areas felt clumsy to me.

I recently switched over to bspwm [0], and I really like it. Instead of automatic layouts, all areas can be split horizontally or vertically (similar to e.g. vim or tmux windowing). The layout tree can be manipulated in various ways, but the only on I use is rotate (ie. change vertical split to horizontal or vice versa). I don't have any status bars or launchers.

It's not all good, though. Just recently the config syntax changed and it was somewhat annoying to upgrade my old config to the new syntax, albeit the new syntax is much better. Hopefully it stabilizes soon.

It's also split in a funny way, so that bspwm only manages windows. It doesn't even listen to the keyboard, but typically uses another app (sxhkd [1]) for listening to the keyboard and launching a process (bspc) to control the wm. This is elegant and unix-ey but responsiveness suffers under heavy load. On the other hand, it's not tied together with a scripting language like e.g. Awesome is bound to Lua and XMonad to Haskell, which is nice.

Status bars and launchers are done with external apps but I don't use any at the moment. I do miss a desktop activity indicator a little, though (tint2 didn't work out of the box with bspwm, lemonbar was too hacky for my taste).

[0] https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm [1] https://github.com/baskerville/sxhkd

Hmm... "Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it’s pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions. There are some distributions that provide binary packages though."

It's really not too bad; just edit the config.h, "make", and put the binary somewhere in your $PATH. Changing the font, colors, keybindings, etc just requires modifying some strings and arrays.

There is always twm.

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