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I am looking to upgrade from dwm to something a little bit easier to configure.
I love dwm, and am generally happy with it. But I need a little more flexibility -- just a little. Maybe different kind of layouts in different windows (or tags or whatever). And while I am fluent in C, I find the way configuration works clumsy and hard to maintain, especially when patches are involved.
However, it seems that every time I look at other tiling wms, they instantly get enormous and even harder to configure.
Do you know of, and can you suggest, a wm that is just a little bit more flexible, one step up from dwm? Or at least something that is small and comes with a reasonable configuration that is not too hard to tweak?
I should add that I am running X and have no interest in Wayland, and that I hate fancy effects and screen noise.
Jan 11 · 4 months ago
I can't compare to dwm but I'm very happy with sway. I'm mostly in terminal emulators (tmux) so I really like the keyboardability (yes, that's a word now) -- I almost never need the mouse.
And I'm a pretty happy user of hyprland.
Another tiling window manager, with some swishy gradient border colours and windows sliding into place.
No wayland...
I use dwl (Wayland equivalent of dwm) and wrote the snail layout patch, it's a layout that works for me in every setup. It doesn't feel restrictive like master/stack, it works well when you want 2 or 3 windows side by side and everything else tucked away, it works when you have many small windows but don't want a "master", and it scales nicely (same algorithm arranges windows in a way that works in 16:9 and 21:9, or 1080p and 4k). Your "configuration" is mostly MOD+i and MOD+d (number of windows in each spiral) and MOD+h and MOD+j (the split between the spirals).
I'm going to pitch a couple that are different, but have some of the virtues of dwm, if that's alright.
I unexpectedly fell in love with CWM, the Calm Window Manager that comes with OpenBSD. It's really nice. Configurable to taste, useful right away, and generally just does what a window manager is designed to do: manage the windows. Other than that, it's out of the way.
Then there's herbstluftwm. What's so nice about this one is that it's got a simple client-server model. If you like the idea of a tiling WM you can configure in a script (or whatever language you want, really, as long as you can call/create a client), herbstluftwm is for you!
I've been using awesome wm forever, never looked back. My understanding is that it's essentially dwm with a Lua runtime strapped onto the front for configuration. Keyboard shortcuts for anything and everything, easy to customize, very lightweight.... it's just awesome
i can second awesomewm. Wayland had me switch to sway a few years ago but I was not happy to switch initially because awesome was, well, awesome :) There is some config but you will get quite far with a few extra lines on top of defaults.
but with that said, why not wayland on linux? the only thing that still works poorly afaik is screen sharing with <insert giant corporate chat client>. apart from that wayland is so much smoother
Spectrwm is a dwm fork that has on-the-fly configuration.
I've also heard good things about cwm from OpenBSD.
+1 for cwm, it can do floating windows and tiling, very easy to configure (without having to rebuild) and has Linux ports
I use I3 on FreeBSD. The config file isn't all that hard to figure out and there's a fair amount of extensibility without it being complex out of the box.
Historical footnote, Sway was developed as a Wayland clone of I3. They even share config formats. I use Sway on Linux and I3 on FreeBSD. Have to look at my shell prompt sometimes to tell the difference.
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