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Comment by simonswain | Hacker News Reader

Xmonad, Emacs, a terminal and Chrome pretty much do the same thing for me on Ubuntu desktop, possibly with a little less pain. Mostly mouse free operation, and easy resizing, swapping etc.

If you want to learn Emacs, just jump in head first. Try and use it like a native. Just for kicks I'm trying to do the same with vi by forcing myself to use it for anything vaguely sysadmin related.

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I generally like that setup better as well, but imo one of the advantages of the emacs approach is that there is more of a culture of providing extensive API hooks for scripting. If you run an RSS reader inside emacs, it's expected that it'll expose many/most of its operations via elisp function entry points, so what's going on in the reader is "transparent" in a sense: scripts can query the list of feeds, the items within the feed, the read/unread status of items, can grab the text of items, can trigger re-fetches, etc. And you can integrate that with a bookmarks manager, outgoing email, whatever.

Most tabbing window managers also provide a pretty good scripting interface, but the programs you run inside them tend to be more opaque. If you run the ncurses RSS reader 'newsbeuter' in a window, your WM scripts can't easily interact with a running instance, short of screenscraping its output and sending it raw keystrokes as input, because it doesn't expose any kind of API.

Thank you for this comment. I spent years thinking emacs was cool, but didn't quite get the push toward using emacs for everything but the kitchen sink until now. Time to take another look at it, I suppose.

He could still run Xmonad and have a workspace for a browser, only switching to it when he wants to check something. Running a proper window manager will not interfere with how many things he wants to run in Emacs.

I've run Xmonad bare on a dual core 1 GHz machine with 512 MB RAM and it ran great. The processes he runs are going to vastly outweigh Xmonad in terms of resource usage. This is one of the worst non-solutions I've seen to this, when he could've had the same setup without any of the hassle.

I really like fluxbox, is very lighweight, so my setup is fluxbox, tilda and chrome. If by some reason I want a full desktop, I just need to type Alt-f2, nautilus, and boile, gnome takes the desktop.

For me, it would be Ratpoison, Vim, Xterm, and Firefox.

I agree that that is the best way to learn Emacs (and vi/vim). For me, the hard part wasn't so much learning to navigate Emacs as it was customizing it to my liking. The basics of Emacs are pretty straightforward (unlike vim, which takes a while to get used to), but using it well requires you to understand how to install packages and at least read emacs lisp.

Do you find yourself needing other little helpers (panel applets) or just run xmonad as is?

Nope. When logging in, I use gnome + xmonad. The topbar from Gnome (with networking etc) stays, and I use dmenu for launching. I like to keep it pretty minimal.

My config is here https://github.com/simonswain/dotxmonad

xmobar is helpful, I find. Beyond that I don't find any need for helpers.

I run Xmonad with no status bars or anything and it works great. No clutter, just the windows I want to have there. I tried it out as an experiment on my laptop to get more screen real estate and then I carried it over to my next desktop install. I used to think that it was obvious that there were things I wanted to have visible all the time, but in reality there was really only one thing that could even qualify for that and that was a clock. When I realized I could do without that, even, I decided to skip status bars entirely.

The effect is what the article is seeking, without the pain of "Oh, but if I want to do this thing I can't". Free with workspaces that can be used for anything, meaning you don't have to deal with this "It opens up on top of everything else, making multitasking useless".

Specifically for the laptop use case, where do you find out how much battery life is left without a top panel?

There were a few 'solutions' that I was content with. You can have a workspace where you have these things (htop, other monitoring tools) and you can also have it in your vim/emacs status-line if you want to keep track of it while working.

I've never actually found that I need something _everywhere_ as much as I need to have it _somewhere_. Monitoring of things like these included.

Edit: I hesitate to call them real solutions, because obviously they are not for everyone. Some people need to see their CPU/RAM usage, network usage, clock and battery level at all times.

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