Hi, Man Shankar wrote: > Hello, > > I want to try out the tiling window managers. I would want to know the > experiences of the users about awesome and xmonad. Primarily i would > like to know which of those two tiling WMs has worked for you guys. The > hurdles you encountered and the gains you got thereof. > > Currently i am a happy e16 user, but the fact that the tiling WMs > "manage" the windows makes me attracted to them. Please comment. >
I switched from e16 to xmonad last summer and haven't regret it so far. One important thing though is to get used to the tiling paradigm, i.e. letting the wm do all the resize and positioning work. I suggest you try it some time and see if it fits you. Personally I started using it only on my home pc while I kept e16 on the laptop for work until I couldn't resist a complete switch to it anymore. I've recently also started using awesome in a few virtual machines, mainly due to the large size of the xmonad dependencies (GHC takes up quite some space). >From my point of view they both look fairly the same with awesome having a few more features (tagging, widgets). It also helps to regard the configuration file (xmonad and >= awesome-3.0) as the main program, e.g. my xmonad.hs looks a bit like a Haskell program where different modules get imported and the main window manager module loaded at the end. You can do quite a lot with those two. Aside from that, the main difference between them are the programming languages they're written in because you have to use it for the configuration file. Awesome uses Lua which is a simple but powerful imperative scripting language and xmonad uses Haskell, an advanced functional programming language which many consider as rather hard to learn. Personally, I didn't know anything about Haskell before using xmonad and I have to admit that I had a few very hard times with it when I wanted to do some advanced (or even simple) configuration changes. But once you wind your head around the functional paradigm (and all those operators and monads) you can do a lot with it. Have a look at the xmonad config archive[1] for some examples. If you're going to use awesome I'd recommend having a look at x11-misc/dmenu as I didn't see any default integration of it in the awesome config (though I might have missed it). Regards, Andi [1] http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive
