No - Desktop !!

Re: Question about f

by code933k on: Feb 23 2008

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That depends on your own settings (Well, that's a too obvious reply)...

You'll see.

SMALL FONTS:

If you take a glimpse at my own screenshots it is because I find small fonts more appealing. I think that most people who like tiling/tabbed WMs tends to use small fonts too because they try to get all the screen size they can for the important things.

By using artwiz fonts in my own case I get consistency between terminals and GUIs so there's no point of return for me ;)

Who need Konsole or Gnome-terminal if there is the faster and attractive urxvt anyway?

If you can interact with more elements on screen you can do more, partially because you need less mechanical energy (mouse + keyboard).

Short Answer:
It is a matter of personal taste and a different approach to productivity: usefulness ~ beauty.

FONT RENDERING

What really manages antialias font settings is the XML configuration into the /etc directory. It is far more simple, expressive, useful and fine-grained when you get costumed. By managing fonts.conf directly you can achieve equal or -really- better results than managing your settings from any DE (Desktop Environment)

I hope this is the answer you were searching for. Anyway just remember that antializing is overrated. In my setup I can work 24 hours without hurting my eyes whilst a Mac with its beauty defaults (which I can emulate if I want) make me blind in one hour...

For more info on "professional" GNU/Linux font rendering (a little outdated but good):

http://antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html

For simple reference:
http://www.lankalinux.com/?q=node/32
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Xorg_and_Fonts

Writing for money and preservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature.
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Re: Question about f

by code933k on: Feb 23 2008

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By the way, welcome to the group!!

Re: Question about f

by marcaemus on: Feb 24 2008

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Another way to change font rendering when not using Gnome or KDE is to set Xft entries in the ~/.Xdefaults file.

Useful ones are:
Xft.dpi: 96
Xft.hinting: 1 (or 0)
Xft.hintstyle: hintnone (or hintslight, hintmedium, hintfull)
Xft.antialias: true (or false)

There are others (Xft.antialiasing) but I can't recall them right now.

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Q. about this WM's

by Ptero4 on: May 24 2008

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Ptero4

Hi. I have been having a small curiosity and this seemed the best place to ask.
What is it that drive people with reasonably spec'd PC's (1GB RAM, AMD Athlon/C2D) to run this non-fancy WM's? Is it the "the uglier the better" mantra, or the M$ law that says you must use the ugliest thing to remain "productive" and "professional"?

Re: Q. about this WM's

by Berticus on: May 27 2008

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I posted about it in my blog http://theparadigmshift.wordpress.com/2008/05/26/does-efficiency-and-productive-need-to-be-ugly/. Basically having something like Beryl, Compiz, or Compiz-Fusion puts useless animation that you'll get tired of. Some people who used to have Beryl got tired of the animations or didn't notice it anymore. Plus having screenlets or different sorts of widgets only added the clutter. With the terminal opened and ready, you could type a single command and get what you need without stuff you don't need. It's beautiful in its simplicity yet ability to increase productivity and efficiency. I mean when you think about it, a lot of the stuff such as the menu, taskbar, sticky notes, everything that makes a UI "pretty" is pretty useless... And you're not completely devoid of graphics. You do have the background and you're still working in X, so you still get any programs that require X.

Re: Re: Q. about this WM's

by code933k on: May 27 2008

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Quite good article by the way ;)

I think we should post some screenshots around here.

There are arguments out there that it's better to have a single standard desktop environment, so that our mothers can find their way around [...] --pekwm doc
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Re: Q. about this WM's

by code933k on: May 27 2008

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Quote:
What is it that drive people with reasonably spec'd PC's (1GB RAM, AMD Athlon/C2D) to run this non-fancy WM's?
Hi. From my point of view it is not about dropping "fancy WMs", it is about usability. i.e with tiling WMs I can get benefit of my wide-screen size whilst having the power to work in many things in "real-time". Also a Desktop is too much chaos for me if you take in account how much steps you need to accomplish the same task and the mental visual clarity you get.

The thing is not just a "WM". Most of this new projects are keyboard driven, providing completely different models of interaction as well. "Power hooks" to do the things, to customize your computing environment in your way.

As for example, if you need a computer for "serious" tasks (including gaming in your spare time ;) a powerful WM + a custom init allow your disk to read a little more fast (3Mb/s to 5Mb/s more) you get much more RAM available for "real things", more processing power, about 30 to 60 FPS more and, thus, overall speed. There's much more stability and, perhaps, security too.

Quote:
Is it the "the uglier the better" mantra, or the M$ law that says you must use the ugliest thing to remain "productive" and "professional"?
That depends in what you name "ugly". Some "minimalistic" WMs look ugly indeed when misconfigured compared with bloated WMs and Desktops. But others don't because they remain unnoticed. The later is what I enjoy and use currently.

Your comment on MS is quite curious [...] I really don't get the relationship there.

Cheers.

There are arguments out there that it's better to have a single standard desktop environment, so that our mothers can find their way around [...] --pekwm doc
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What's your WM ?

by code933k on: Feb 24 2008

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I was too used to Ion3, developed some scripts for that, jumped to WMII (multi-panel support), jumped to DWM and then....

I am with Xmonad, and like it as anything else !!

Writing for money and preservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature.
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Re: What's your WM

by marcaemus on: Feb 25 2008

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Fluxbox (for a little style) with mrxvt (very fast, tabbed screens). Wrote a python script to generate menus.

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Re: Re: What's your WM

by tamihania on: Feb 25 2008

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I'm using tabbed urxvt :)
Your script - where could I eventually find the link to it if you don't mind?
Kind regards,
tami

"One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes." Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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Re: Re: Re: What's y

by marcaemus on: Feb 25 2008

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Its in its IceWM mode at present, so give me a day or two to translate it back to Fluxbox and tidy it up a bit. It reads the standard .desktop entries in /usr/share/applications and /usr/local/share/applications and spits out a menu that resembles the Gnome menus. I should probably rewrite it to spew out both IceWM and Fluxbox menus and take notice of KDE entries. And, yes, I know both WMs have their own menu generators but I like the same menu structure no matter with WM I'm using.

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Re: Re: Re: Re: What's y

by tamihania on: Feb 25 2008

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Thanks a lot - I will wait.
All the best from,
tami :)

"One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes." Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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MenuMaker

by marcaemus on: Feb 26 2008

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Rather than re-inventing the wheel, here's a link to MenuMaker which generates menus for Flux|Open|Blackbox, PekWM, IceWM, Deskmenu and WindowMaker. Its what originally gave me the idea to write my own, but this is much better.

[url]menumaker.sourceforge.net[/url]

Let me know what you think.

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Re: What's your WM ?

by tamihania on: Feb 25 2008

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It seems that I settled with PekWM (at least for now...) - I like it a lot, it's easy to set and it's getting off ofyour way. But I still miss sometimes the ability to tile windows here ( from Wmii, Dwm or Awesome - never tried Xmonad though...).
Greetings to all,
tami

"One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes." Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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Re: Re: What's your

by code933k on: Feb 26 2008

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If you enjoy it is worth having it.

Greetings !!

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Re: What's your WM

by arpbook on: Feb 26 2008

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hi, and thanks for invitation. i discover software with ubuntu dapper and now work on crunchbang linux with openbox/rox-filer as evil couple.i work on mac too so i really appreciate the anti-mac channel ;-)
using no-desktop since crunchbang(one month), i want to work on real pure backgrounds, gdm and usplash.
@code933k : really like your icon-set project... when you want!
... i think i'm a litle newb(& french) so don't be cruel...... it's my first group :)

Re: Re: What's your

by code933k on: Mar 1 2008

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Thanks, and no problem for that ;)
I'll be a n00b ethernally no matter what I know.

Ignorance is the same as an utterly repeated epistemological failure. The problem is ignorants don't realize what epistemological is.
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Starting out

by Berticus on: Feb 29 2008

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Hey, so I have been trying to find a suitable wm to fit all of my needs. From what I've been told any of the boxes such as openbox, blackbox, fluxbox, etc. should accomplish what I would like, but I'm having trouble finding the correct addons to get the features that I use in Gnome + Beryl, which are:

Toggle between tiling windows and floating windows mode, scrolling through workspace if the mouse is over the background, freely moving windows over workspaces, scrolling through the window selector, clipboard manager, character palette, volume control (issue with soundcard and alsa requires I change the volume at start up to get both speakers to work), and weather reporter.

If someone could tell me which wm comes closest with all of these features either natively or through plugins (and which plugins I would need), that would be greatly appreciated.

Re: Starting out

by marcaemus on: Feb 29 2008

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Here's one idea. Fluxbox supports dragging windows across workspaces and mouse-wheel on background to swap workspaces. For sound, weather, etc try Screenlets (http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Screenlets?content=73346). For a clipboard manager try Parcellite (http://gnomefiles.org/app.php/Parcellite).

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Re: Re: Starting out

by Berticus on: Mar 1 2008

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Thanks! How about toggling between how the windows are organized (floating and tiled)?

Re: Re: Re: Starting

by marcaemus on: Mar 1 2008

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You can get fluxbox to tile by adding an entry in the ~/.fluxbox/keys file to map a key combo to the 'ArrangeWindows' action. e.g., Mod1 F1 :ArrangeWindows

To pick on on code933k's contribution on keeping things lightweight: alsa has its own volume mixer on the command line: alsamixer. For weather and system monitor there's conky (conky.sourceforge.net).

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Woops, typo

by marcaemus on: Mar 2 2008

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Sorry, should read 'To pick up on code933k's contibution'. Not picking on anyone :)

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Re: Woops, typo

by Berticus on: Mar 2 2008

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Thanks, I guess I'll have to try fluxbox and xmonad out with those suggested add-ons.

I know alsa has its own mixer, but if there's something that I have to do every time I turn on my computer, I'd like it to be done automatically.

I have the M-Audio Revolution 5.1, and unfortunately there's a little bug where only the right speaker works when I turn my computer on. The work around for that is I have to adjust the volume and feed begins to go to both speakers again.

If I could, I'd write a script to adjust the volume right after alsa is loaded, that way I could get sound to both speakers even before login. Alas, I haven't figured out how to do it yet. If I could find such a script I wouldn't ask for a GUI volume controller at all.

Re: Starting out

by code933k on: Mar 1 2008

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Hi Berticus, welcome in !!

I'll try to answer quicky as I will be out of Internet since today...

Quote:
Toggle between tiling windows and floating windows mode.

DWM, XMONAD, Ion and WMII support this.
Xmonad has about 10 customizable modes however...

Quote:
Scrolling through workspace if the mouse is over the background.
In tiling window managers that's piece of cake. DWM and WMII support this. Xmonad could achieve the same but it's currently supported just from your keyboard as it is keyboard centered.

Quote:
freely moving windows over workspaces, scrolling through the window selector, clipboard manager, character palette, volume control (issue with soundcard and alsa requires I change the volume at start up to get both speakers to work), and weather reporter.

This is supported from (native) menu ie. dmenu, scripts (in any language you want including C and other "compiled" ones) and native .xinitrc or .xsession instead of complicated and memory hungry "plugins, screenlets". (I am just talking about tiling WMs...)

For moving freely a Window in Xmonad is just ALT+SHIFT+1 [2 .. 3 ... etc]
And toggling floating/fixed states is ALT+T or ALT+SPACE.
Switching workspaces:
ALT+1 [2...3...etc]

Well, very keyboard centered but more practical and ergonomic as well ;)

The way tiling WMs work breaks a little the assumptions you make into a WIMP model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_%28computing%29).

I hope this helps a little.

Regards.

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Re: Re: Starting out

by Berticus on: Mar 2 2008

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Thanks for detailing this for me! I'll have to try out both xmonad and fluxbox to see which one I prefer.

Swift switch...

by code933k on: May 5 2008

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Suddenly I've got ratpoison and I love it.
A little privitive compared with Xmonad but a little less memory ungry and quite joyful.

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dwm user here

by siredgar on: May 6 2008

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siredgar

I have used dwm the last six months. It's great, especially in combination with Dzen2 and Dina-font.

I'm quite puzzled, why make an anti-desktop group on gnome-look?

Don't misunderstand me I joined your group and I'm all for it. Just curious.

An Archer.
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Re: dwm user here

by code933k on: May 7 2008

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I don't think it's offensive. It is a question its own right indeed!

There is more than one single answer -as you probably know- but let's resume:

Gnome is more stable, faster and lighter than KDE in my own experience, therefore I do use some Gnome/GTK2 apps (ie. Epiphany, for its great keyboard oriented features) but I don't botter with the "desktop" because I was tired of dragging "windows" and clicking icons since the 90's.

I like Gnome precisely because it is very customizable for looking good while it doesn't interfere with my way to modify and use the system

Any Gnome improvement benefits GTK, any GTK improvement benefits me. The same for those users of KDE/Qt apps which doesn't like the desktop for quite much similar reasons.

Being a Gentoo user I can use Gnome without hal/dbus so the desktop interprocess "bloats" get off my away too ;) But I am a 'loyal' Gnome user anyway.

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Re: dwm user here

by code933k on: May 7 2008

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Sorry for that typos: should read "in its own right" and "I don't bother" :p

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AwesomeWM

by tamihania on: May 6 2008

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Hi, it's nice to see more and more people joining the group. I would like recommend Awesome WM to all fans of tiling window managers. Right now I'm using the git version of it. It's very easy to configure through awesomerc(as easy as Fluxbox or PekWM) but it has all features of dwm and wmii... and - then some ;). In combination with conky-cli and/or amazing - it is fulfilling all my needs for Window Manager, that is - it's very light but still - nice looking, not distracting and extremely flexible. Wishing everybody nice day - tami.

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Re: AwesomeWM (nice)

by code933k on: May 7 2008

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Glad to hear that. Can you please post some screenshots so that we can see your personal setup?

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Re: Re: AwesomeWM (nice)

by tamihania on: May 7 2008

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Of course - the little bit older screen shots (with awesomerc) are available here:
http://tamilinux.wordpress.com/2008/03/23/awesome-awesome/

Right now, I'm running awesome-git (upcoming version 3 - thanks to AUR repository on Arch Linux). It seems quite stable. I will post some screen shots soon in the usual place :) and post the link here. Enjoy!

"One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes." Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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Re: Re: AwesomeWM (nice)

by tamihania on: May 7 2008

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...and the latest screen shots + configuration files:
http://tamilinux.wordpress.com/2008/05/07/awesome-git-conky-in-the-panel/. I hope you like it - anyway - enjoy!
tami

"One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes." Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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Re: Re: AwesomeWM (n

by code933k on: May 8 2008

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Quite good! Now I can see that "awesomerc" you have ;)

That is a lot of new information for me. So awesomeWM forked from DWM mainly to offer things like font hints (antialiasing) to please users instead of zealot developers. Well, that benefits a lot the community who wants better but also "good looking" apps.

Managing font hints correctly is rater "complicated" for average users (as we saw above) but that's a great addition.

In an off topic: Is that butterflies wallpaper of yours? You should publish here if you can. It is not my style but it's certainly a beauty.

You are a very nice person. Cheers!

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Re: Re: Re: AwesomeWM (n

by tamihania on: May 8 2008

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