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Technology/WMs and Email, (sdf.org), 01/17/2019
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I'm a capricious user, especially when it comes to window
managers. I'll install and use a random new wm (if I can
find one I haven't tried yet) for no reason at all. Today,
after discovering that visiting a URL in Firefox, or typing
this line in an xterm:

echo -e "\xe2\x9b\x93b" | xargs xsetroot -name

killed my running dwm, I decided I was due for some
experimenting. Something about an almost-stock install of
dwm just dying because an unwelcome unicode character
presented itself for display on the "bar" made me irritable.
I don't want to be wasting time browsing Firefox or
Thunderbird Themes only to have my computer brusquely return
me to lightdm without my consent.

But, this isn't a rant about dwm- which is a fine wm if
you're willing to do the work- this is about what I was
doing when dwm crashed, and what I found afterward.

Before dmw puked out, I was innocently attempting to use
Thunderbird as an email client. Every year or so, I bounce
around between the easy and readily-available clients, to
remind myself what I didn't like about them. This time I
setup and used sylpheed, and then Thunderbird. The resource
usage of Thunderbird seemed absurdly high. I searched out a
few "fixes" and also gave it time to "settle." This paid
off, and Thundbird turned out to be a rather feature-rich
client with relatively low overhead. I know that last
sentence is wrong, but I'm leaving it there anyway.

Of course, vanilla Thunderbird is rather bright, so
switching between tiled terminal windows and email was
jarring. Themes... it has themes. I decided to look at this
one:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark/?src=search

which brought dwm to its knees. Hey! I'm not here to
complain about dwm dying, doggone it.

I took a few minutes to search around and figure out why my
dwm was dying (I'm not going to mention it again, I
promise) and then decided that it was time to play with wm's
again. I really can't have a wm that dies if I go to the
wrong website. Scanned around for anything new, and stumbled
upon "subtle." I couldn't recall having tried it, so I
installed it and fired it up.

Coming, most recently, from spectrwm and dwm, I was pleased
by a few things in subtle (which I used for the afternoon.)
First, the "gravity" thing is pretty neat. Tiling is manual,
and you can use W(indows)-numpad to anchor your windows to
corresponding portions of the screen. I fired up three
uxterms, anchored one to the full left half of the screen
with W-4, and the other two to the top/bottom of the right
half of the screen with W-9 and W-3. Pretty easy and fast, I
felt. Double pressing a W-numpad combo provided you with a
few different size options at that anchor point.

Another thing I enjoyed was the "tagging" concept. When you
fire up a terminal (of whatever type you define) it shows up
on the "terms" screen; when you fire up a browser, it shows
up on the "www" screen, and so forth. Basically, you
configure where you want programs of various types, and they
go there automatically. This is a little backward in a
window manager that won't automatically tile, but that's
beside the point. It was neat to fiddle with.

Presently, I'm back in spectrwm until I can figure out how
to make dwm bullet proof (I thought it was! But I'm not
talking about it.) The only thing I miss going from dmw back
to spectrwm (I learned spectrwm first) is the mouse
shortcuts to the desktops (or whatever they call them, I
don't care) that were in the upper-left of my dwm. The
Bionic distro's 3.1.0 spectrwm doesn't have that. It's nice
when you're already over at the mouse, to be able to quickly
swap desktops before returning to the keyboard. I lived
without it before though, I'm sure I'll be fine.

And now I've demonstrated how I waste precious time during
my work day, and I've wasted even more time by hammering my
thoughts out. At least I knew I was wasting time; half-way
through my escapade, I took a "break" to work on my
grandfather's insolvent estate, something that has been a
little thorn in my side for the past half-year, and which I
hope to tie off in the near future. If you were me, you'd
choose the window-manager-email-client-adventure too, rigth?