I used Fluxbox/Blackbox wm for more than 10 years. It’s a great window manager for people who prefer a lightweight system and love to customize their system. Now it was time for a change…
Hard Decision
There is nothing wrong with Fluxbox. It’s a great WM. I just wanted to change something and also optimize my workflow somehow. Most of my windows are terminal windows, and I control them mostly using the keyboard. It would be nice to have a Window Manager that supports my heavily use of the keyboard. That’s how I came to tiling window managers. They use all the space of the desktop and have shortkeys for everything. Perfect for me.
Herbstluft
My first choice was herbstluftwm. It’s a nice tiling Window Manager and the best thing is: the configuration can be scripted and changed at runtime using the herbstluft-client.
I3wm
After a time of testing I came to I3. It is very very well documented, super intuitive and supports tabbing and stacking. Everything on this wm is just right. It works like a charm and it feels like being home. Checkout this clip for it’s features:
Conclusio
I was a little bit afraid of learnig all the shortcuts and stuff. But it was so intuitive that it took me just a little while. My windows are very well organized now and I have the feeling that this WM suits me perfectly.
