Sam Danielson

Wmii is the sweetest window manager. I tried it along with Ratpoisen and a couple other mouse killing WM’s one day. After weening myself off the gui power management and wireless icons in KDE this is kicking butt on the laptop. Windows are automatically tiled into views as they appear and you can tag windows to create new views. Floating windows are a little out of place but are handled well enough.

The main event loop and status bar are implemented in bash script. These scripts communicate with wmii through a Plan 9 filesystem interface, which is sort of like the proc filesystem. Performing io on this filesystem controls the window manager. If I want to change my status bar clock to quit showing seconds, I edit the status script. To add a keyboard shortcut for a custom command, I modify the event loop script.

For folks that want absolute minimalism there is dwm, a stripped down version of wmii. Configuration is done by editing a header file. wc *.{c,h} yeilds 2178 lines and it compiles in about 2 seconds so I suppose that’s not a big deal. I prefer wmii though because I think Plan 9 is a great idea. It’s sort of like a “live” XML config file for a running process that uses Unix paths instead of Xpaths.

I command you to try it. Wmii

PS. The default key shortcuts are very vi like. Very nice.