User pet84rik seems to have the same affinity for window
managers that I have[1]. He posted about trying out
spectrwm, a tiling window manager[2], so I figured I'd
follow along and try it out for myself for a day.

I've installed and fired-up spectrwm before, but I can't
say that I've ever really given it a fair shake. In the
past, I wanted a WM that was immediately usable- one that
I didn't need to look at the manpage at all on. That's not
really reasonable, but it's how I was. After playing with
TinyWM, and a few others, I'm a lot more patient with the
more esoteric WM's, and I'm glad for it.

So far I've been using spectrwm for about half of a work
day, putting it through my normal workflow paces. I did
have to read the manpage, which I'm not ashamed to admit,
but I found that many of the bindings were already familiar
enough so that they weren't hard to learn.

I haven't ever been a huge fan of tiling WMs, but I'm not
really sure why after spending some time with spectrwm. I
enjoy the tiling behavior and options, and find them easy
to use and understand for the most part. It's excessively
convenient for organzing xterms. The only real issue I
had was opening a browser in one workspace, moving it to
another workspace, then having my new browser windows open
in the original workspace instead of the one I moved the
browser to. That was confusing a bit.

As for customization, I enjoy spectrwm's simple key = val
approach. It "Just Works(Tm)," and there is really nothing
to learn. The config variables are self-explanatory, and
the manpage details the options fully if any aren't clear.
Here is what I changed:

 - Reduced the workspaces. Conf was set to 22. I don't
   need 22, so I set it to 9 (which is still more than
   I normally use, but oh well.)
 - Turned on warp_pointer, which I like.
 - Named my workspaces.
 - Reset the default [term] program to plain xterm
 - Added several familiar program-launch shortcuts
   bound to Mod4 (win) + various keys
 - Bound my keyboard's media buttons to various
   programs and functions (amixer to raise/lower/mute my
   volume; forward/back keys to switch between workspaces.)

That took just a few minutes between editing the file and
using xev to find my key names, a quick MOD+q to restart
the window manager, and all works perfectly.

I should report the memory usage that I've observed for
spectrwm. This is the thing I check first, to see if I
even want to bother learning. I was pleased with what I
saw:

 pidof spectrwm | xargs ps -o rss,sz,vsz
   RSS    SZ    VSZ
  5796 16616  66464

This compares quite well to other light WMs. In terms of
"bang for the buck," (BFTB) at least. It's a very scientific
measure, BFTB.

My conclusion so far is that spectrwm is a pleasant WM to
work with, with a suitable feature set and a low memory
footprint. As pet84rik said in his post "you can maybe do
similar or even the same things with plenty of other WMs,"
but spectrwm does do a good job of keeping it light and
functional.


[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/pet84rik/BLOG/FEB18/Feb27-spectrwm
[2] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/Tiling window manager

You are viewing proxied material from zaibatsu.circumlunar.space. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.