20190621-dwm.txt
Recently I found a really good minimalist window manager. I'm very
much a functionalist and a minimalist, which is why I got into *nix
systems in the first place; sadly Windows has become extremely bloated
even on a bare-bones install (I still dual boot, but my HDD-based
Win10 install is just slower than molasses).
Anyway, dwm is a part of the suckless.org software set, and it is
really nice. Unfortunately for me, I installed it via repo instead of
building it (yeah, I know. I'm still mostly used to Windows'
methodology of not building packages, although I did recently bite the
bullet and build MakeMKV). I'm very aware of how often I screw up
instructions and I've broken many OS installs messing around, so I try
my best to steer clear of building and installing packages.
It's an excellently-coded window manager: tags for virtual desktops,
auto-tiling, low resource use, an actual toolbar (one of my gripes
against fluxbox), and generally keyboard-driven, which is my kind of
thing.
Its flaws (for vanilla builds) are that dwm-tools is a necessary
accessory, volume control via keyboard is missing, and I have issues
with starting Guild Wars in it. GW1 works fine in Xfce, but I suspect
some hardware acceleration or something is not turning on in dwm to
allow drawing the window. Civ5 via Steam still works fine, though. And
by default there is no status monitor for battery, network, volume,
etc. that "regular" WMs have. It's a separate install, or a script,
which in my experience is just an insane loop that isn't worth the
trouble since my tmux setup (which I usually have open for volume) has
that stuff covered. The other flaw I've noticed is that since the meta
or control key or whatever is Alt, it will override application Alt
shortcuts.
Honestly it would be nigh perfect if I fixed the volume control and
status monitor issues. I just wish the base had just a little bit more
included: I personally think nobody in their right mind would not want
some sort of volume control included.
