Why I prefer wmii over other window managers.
Nic asked what’s the point with wmii and dwm in a comment on that Jyte claim. I figured I could reproduce my response here.
For me, it’s not really about faster or better productivity, but thinking less. The layout is predefined, there’s really not much to theme, most actions work on hotkeys, the screen real estate is available for programs and it takes less ressources.
My friend Yannick does great use of the tags feature of wmii. Tags are basically workspaces, except application instances can have more then one tag, allowing it to appear on multiple workspaces. One for work, one for home, one for email, etc. And the same mail application instance will appear in both work and email. In his case, he’s fully taking advantage of the workflow.
Plus, wmii borrows a lot from the plan 9 philosophy. You manipulate the environment by messing with a virtual file system. Much like ii does for IRC, again by the same developpers.
dwm is a little more contrived, which is why I’m preferring wmii for now. But eventually, I might find enough time to hack its code to suit my needs better.
It’s not for everyone, but it’s perfect for me. In Windows, I stopped using the Explorer shell in 1997 or 1998, I’m not sure anymore, preferring a very minimal litestep configuration instead showing only a clock, which was in fact an input box to launch programs.
