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Comment by thom | Hacker News Reader

I remember back in the 90s caring about window managers and playing with Enlightenment and its weird wavy desktop. It was cool because it was different. I used Blackbox throughout university because we were all on a shared server doing remote X sessions and everyone loading KDE at the start of a lesson would slow it to a crawl.

But then I got two monitors and a job and stopped caring. I need virtual desktops, a launcher, and a good settings app. I’ve never tiled windows outside of Emacs, which runs full screen on one monitor opposite a browser on the other monitor. I’m baffled by people who need to have seven terminals open alongside a tiny YouTube video. Either watch the video or do some work.

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That's great if that works for you. But for me being productive often includes multiple PDF files or editor windows being open and having them all float or just two next to each other just isn't an option. With a tiling wm I can have 4 or 6 windows PDFs open on a single 24" monitor and that works perfectly.

Just let people decide for themselves how to be productive, it's great your work allows you to be productive on two windows, some other people may need more, some less.

My usage of tiling window managers is quite different from what you describe. For the most part, I only have two windows open. Sometimes I am actually using two applications concurrently. More often than not, the second window exists solely to make the window I'm working in narrower. I formed this habit long before floating window managers could snap windows to the edge of the screen and never felt the desire to move on. Besides, I find an inactive terminal far less distracting than a hole showing the desktop.

I have been using Blackbox for more than a decade now. What I think sets it apart from other window managers and light desktops is that it looks good out of the box: professional and restrained, which is the way I like it. It is also fast and efficient. Other windows managers and light desktops look kind of amateurish to me. I find it strange that software with nice looks is often bloated and inefficient. Designing texts and widgets with proper size, alignment and spacing, and choosing nice colors won't make the software slower.

That's a common argument which is essentially, "I grew up and needed to be productive so that's why I don't use tiling window managers."

It's ironic and silly because I use a tiling window manager to _be_ productive. I have used the same settings, window manager and configuration since 2006. That is exactly why I love it, it's stable as can be and I can rely on it forever (at least until X11 doesn't work anymore, but I will probably be dead by then).

Which window manager? I think only ratpoison, larswm, and Ion existed back then? As for X11, recently changes were added to Xwayland's rootfull mode to allow running a full X environment on Wayland.

Both dwm and wmii existed in 2006.

I use dwm, in particular a Debian netinstall with no desktop environment. Simply install X and dwm. I have my own fork of dwm with my customizations on a separate branch.

I can update dwm by pulling master and rebasing my branch on master. Has worked since 2006. With that being said, dwm hasn't changed much since 2006.

There's configs which make Sway behave (more) like dwm. Sway is config-compatible with i3, so that makes it a good successor as a tiling window manager.

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