Other Choose a WM by productivity

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Patrick Bär

Good evening,

I am looking for a new WM which combines speed + good looks + productivity!

Speed brings me to lxde and openbox, good looks to enlightenment, which I would probably prefer. BUT I can't find information on productivity settings (or rather said possibilities).

I would like, for example, to fire up a new terminal session while keeping my hands on the keyboard or make a shortcut to dim the other windows and start a menu which can be navigated also by the keyboard.

Is there some place to look for such information?
 
Patrick Bär said:
I would like, for example, to fire up a new terminal session while keeping my hands on the keyboard or make a shortcut to dim the other windows and start a menu which can be navigated also by the keyboard.
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Have you looked at WMs like x11-wm/i3 and x11-wm/awesome? They're almost completely keyboard driven and you rarely have to touch a mouse.
 
Sure look cool, but in the videos I only see text. What if you work with, say two browser windows, an email-client, two terminals and an office-document? Tiling is somewhat useless, if you don't run a 32" screen :)

I dream about somebody poppin in my office and saying "Hey Patrick, can you have a look on that server, what's wrong with it?", I hit two or three keys and the open windows minimize, a new browser opens with the icinga-page of the machine, followed by a terminal with a tail -f on the logfile and another terminal with the command prompt. Work is done, I press another two buttons and the browser is closed, the terminals log out and my old windows appear. Magic...
 
I run two and three 24-inch monitors with i3. I run two browsers in one of the tiles, or floated, and other tiles have the files I'm working on. I can also open other workspaces that are hidden till I need them, or let them run stuff in the background. I open more tiles or workspaces with two keys.
 
Patrick Bär said:
Sure look cool, but in the videos I only see text. What if you work with, say two browser windows, an email-client, two terminals and an office-document? Tiling is somewhat useless, if you don't run a 32" screen :)

I dream about somebody poppin in my office and saying "Hey Patrick, can you have a look on that server, what's wrong with it?", I hit two or three keys and the open windows minimize, a new browser opens with the icinga-page of the machine, followed by a terminal with a tail -f on the logfile and another terminal with the command prompt. Work is done, I press another two buttons and the browser is closed, the terminals log out and my old windows appear. Magic...
Click to expand...
I'd have to agree with both SirDice and drhowarddrfine that in what you wrote above, a tiling window manager would be best suited to that sort or work flow. If you insist on eye candy, x11/kde4 is probably the most configurable good looking desktop environment in my opinion. I say just try some of them out and see what you like best. :)
 
Well, there are hundreds of ways to do this with i3! Or say a dozen. Maybe only a couple of. One. There is definitely one way to do this. I hope there is ... :eek:)

Seriously, I am still looking for what I described before. New workspace with three windows neatly arranged and so on...
 
Maybe I'm not following but you just hit alt-Enter three times and you have three 'windows'. In each window you start up a browser, or gimp, or vim, or what have you.
 
Hm, Alt+Enter gives me three terminals, why should it create a "window"?

I try to make things go automatic, it should work like this:

- I press Alt+Supermegabutton
- A new workspace opens
- Floating window appears and let's me choose among different connections (need to program this in either shell or perl, or use pac manager or whatever)
- Floating window disappears and three tiled windows appear: Two terminals and one browser

Code: 
----------------------------------------------------
| Terminal       | Browser                         |
|                |                                 |
|----------------|                                 |
| Terminal       |                                 |
|                |                                 |
----------------------------------------------------

- I joyfully begin typing some magic into the terminals and so on
- I press Alt+Anothersupermegabutton
- Open windows close and the workspace terminates, sending me back to the old workspace
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http://i3wm.org/docs/layout-saving.html

What I do is have a script in my .i3 directory

Code: 
i3-msg 'workspace 1; append_layout /home/rodderod/.i3/workspace-1.json'

xterm &
xterm &
xterm &

This starts three xterm on the 1st workspace using the layout I saved in workspace-1.json.

I can provide screenshot and the .json file when I get home later...it's too large to type and I'm at work.


You could probably make keybindings to do opening and closing if you really wanted...but why not just have it running on it's own workspace that you could switch to.
 
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