X Window Managers
I've played around with several X window managers in the quest for a graphical environment that is:
- Convenient -- all the necessary menus and things easily configurable, etc.
- Visually appealing -- I don't want to be stuck with an ugly interface.
- Relatively low in resource requirements -- my home system is a P133 with 32MB of RAM and 1MB of video RAM, so it can't handle anything too fancy.
Disregarding at least one of the above principles in each case, I experimented with a bunch of window managers. Twm, Fvwm, Fvwm2, IceWM, AfterStep, Saw(fish)mill, Enlightenment (with and without Gnome), WindowMaker, XFce, Sapphire (here is a very useful guide to a bunch of these window managers and others)... I tried all of these with varying levels of frustration. (Let's not even talk about KDE! It was the first graphical environment I saw after I installed Mandrake 7.0 [my first Linux experience], and I marvelled at how slow and bloated it was. Words cannot describe the joy I felt when I realized I didn't have to run KDE.)
I don't want to go into detail on the shortcomings of each of these window managers, because I don't mean to insult their authors. Suffice it to say that some of these are resource hogs on a lightweight machine such as mine, and some just don't seem to have the configurability that I was looking for. WindowMaker, for example, though I used it happily for a good many months, forced me to use a GUI configuration tool, and somehow this just didn't work for me. Sometimes a well-commented config file is more intuitive than a point-and-click interface, at least to me.
And then there was Blackbox. An unassuming little window manager. I had read that it was fast, but I could never figure out how to use it. And then I discovered bb.themes.org, and the Blackbox Guide. I learned that hacking Blackbox themes was remarkably simple, as was configuring default behavior and menus. This made me happy. Blackbox menu syntax is the essence of simplicity:
[begin] (Menu)
[exec] (xterm) {xterm}
[exec] (Netscape Navigator) {netscape-navigator}
...
[end]
And of course you can have submenus and things, and there are some special options, like including other menu files as submenus, restarting into Blackbox or some other window manager, etc. Blackbox also has a device called the Slit, which is a lot like AfterStep's Wharf and WindowMaker's Dock, and can hold many of the dockapps developed for these window managers (though this isn't always perfect, in my experience). Anyway, before I ramble on too much more, I should get to the point: Blackbox rocks! It can be made to be very visually appealing (screenshot), easily, I might add, and it doesn't use all of my feeble system's resources. When I get myself a newer computer, I may be lured away by the hyper-configurability and eye-candy of Enlightenment, but there will at least always be a soft spot in my heart for Blackbox.
Some more things I like about Blackbox...
- No panel. Gnome, KDE, and other panel-oriented graphical environments give me the willies because they remind me of Gatesware. I'll take a root menu, thank you very much.
- Automagic menu configuration. I can edit my menu while Blackbox is running, and lo, the new entries appear as if a gift from some benevolent computing god.
- It doesn't ask me whether I really want to exit when I want to exit. Of course I want to exit, otherwise I wouldn't have clicked on "Exit". This logic seems to escape other window managers.
Well, I'm sure I've left out a lot of useful information, and there are a bunch of things above that should be linked to something off-site, and maybe I'll get to that one of these days. For now, take this page as a vote for Blackbox as a delightful and useful window manager.
Copyright © 2001 Matt Holland.
This page last modified 4/13/01.
Made with Emacs.