It's been two weeks since user pet84rik mentioned spectrwm
and I tried it out[1]. This was not my first exposure to a
tiling wm, but it was the first time I decided to give one a
real try. I've been using it since.
In the last few days, I've had some issues that I've had to
resolve using spectrwm's "quirks" settings. Libreoffice was
killing the wm on exit, for some reason. It doesn't seem to
happen when the Libreoffice windows are floated; so, I added
a quirks setting to make them start floated. Media playback
was annoying me, so I setup that to float as well.
Sadly, no all of the issues I found could be fixed. Just
today, I was attempting to run a program with javaws. It was
causing me all kinds of grief, so I thought I'd attempt to
setup quirks for it. Unfortunately, the CLASS data shown by
xprop doesn't seem to be doing the trick. For now, I'm going
to have to start a different WM to run that program, which
sucks.
Which leads me to my next observation: when you change the
way you do something, it's amazing how quickly and deeply
that change occurs. Because I had to run that javaws program
for my work, I had to fire up fluxbox today (well, I had to
choose something non-tiling.) It was almost disturbing how
unnatural it felt to use. I've used fluxbox for years, and
spectrwm for only two weeks, and it was actually difficult
to switch back. I say difficult; what I mean is, it felt
slow and kludgy, and I used to feel like fluxbox was quite
efficient. Maybe it still is, and I would just have to get
used to it again.
At any rate, I'm very, very pleased with the way spectrwm
works, and the very small amount of effort it has required
of me. Now, if I could find a way to get javaws to behave,
I'd be in an even better place.
[1]
gopher://grex.org:70/0/~tfurrows/phlog/2018/FEB2018/am9_spectrwmDay.txt
