fastest & lightest window-manager ?

It's xfce4 for me ... not the lightest or fastest but it has almost all of the Gnome look and functionality that I care about minus the bloat.
 
That seems to be a good foundation for starting develop a very own window manager :) Wouldn´t it be great to have a FreeBSD-wm with graphics and menues designed for freebsd-use only :)
 
DemoDoG said:
That seems to be a good foundation for starting develop a very own window manager :) Wouldn´t it be great to have a FreeBSD-wm with graphics and menues designed for freebsd-use only :)
Click to expand...

it is no hard to imagine:

user A: I want KDE-like FreeBSD wm
user B: I wank GNOME-like FreeBSD wm
user C: I want XFCE-like FreeBSD wm (it is me)
user D: I want Fluxbox-like FreeBSD wm
and all other flavours

:p
 
Good suggestions here. In case you want more than just a window manager, take a look at XFCE - it's a very lightweight desktop environment.
 
I don't think you can really notice the difference in speed between most of the "light window managers" such as tiny, fluxbox, twm, fvwm, etc. on any reasonably modern computer (2GHz/512MB or better), the difference would measured in microseconds if not faster ... To fast for any human to notice.

I use PekWM (with stalonetray), it's fast, stable, configurable.
 
I think the smallest really usable wm is dwm which has less than 2000 lines of code. I as lots of OpenBSD people use OpenBSD version of CWM (calm window manager) which is recently ported to FreeBSD. For more standard really light window manager I suggest JWM (Joe's own window manager) used by DSL for instance. The most comprehensive list of WM

http://xwinman.org/others.php

Bare in mind that the size of WM is not all that matters. It is
also very important to check the size of dependencies.
For instance JWM has no dependencies beyond X libraries.
Somebody was comparing dependencies and resource consumption for
most popular minimalistic WM but I do not remember the link and
I could not find it with Google.

The another thind to take into account is if the WM is present in base or not.
I use CWM because it is in the base of OpenBSD and I like it better than FVWM and TWM which are also in the base.

In some sense TWM is probably best choice for WM because it comes with
X window system and it is available on all Unix like systems which run X window system. The same goes for instance for ed (editor) since it is only
editor which is present on all Unix like systems.
 
Personaly I use Wmii which is very light and ergonomic. It permit to be very fast and permit to manipulate the wm without mouse. I have used fluxbox for a long time but now I'm a Wmii addict :)
In the same spirit, there is Awesome which is a great wm.
 
I started with twm on Coherent Unix, and have never really felt the need to substitute another (though some years ago I did try every wm in the ports tree just for fun).
 
This is a very interesting thread. I don't think I saw one mention of BlackBox. I had a 700mhz web server that I felt needed a WM. I used Torsmo to monitor usage and found that Blackbox was perfect. I don't remember all that I compared it with but it is VERY fast.

Up to about 2 weeks ago, on modern machines I have been using blackbox as well. I like how simple it is. Now for added flexibility I am using Fluxbox. Fluxbox seems to be very light weight as well. I have not compared Fluxbox resource usage to anything though.

Oh, I think Blackbox was originally written for BSD to! So they probably play well together. ;)

Hope this helps!
 
xteraco said:
This is a very interesting thread. I don't think I saw one mention of BlackBox. I had a 700mhz web server that I felt needed a WM. I used Torsmo to monitor usage and found that Blackbox was perfect. I don't remember all that I compared it with but it is VERY fast.

Up to about 2 weeks ago, on modern machines I have been using blackbox as well. I like how simple it is. Now for added flexibility I am using Fluxbox. Fluxbox seems to be very light weight as well. I have not compared Fluxbox resource usage to anything though.

Oh, I think Blackbox was originally written for BSD to! So they probably play well together. ;)

Hope this helps!
Click to expand...

Didn't fluxbox come from blackbox? I also like to play around with xmonad from time to time.
 
Yes, fluxbox has emerged from blackbox, just tried blackbox, looks really nice, but is it possible to switch virtual screens like in fluxbox ?
 
Evilwm is a good candidate

I found the memory foot print of evilwm to be one of the smallest ( less than 300 KB, which is even smaller than fvwm, fluxbox, awesome and most of their derivatives ). And it is very usable with full keyboard control as well as mouse control. But the controls are hard-coded, so it may not be usable for some people (as the man page points out). I found Ratpoison to be pretty good, but I need a mouse while using firefox ( navigating to a url using keyboard is painful when there are many of them in a page).

hth
subhacom
 
kasse said:
What are peoples opinions about Xmonad?
Click to expand...

Great in terms of modularity.
Not what I could call the most lightweight though.

1. I would suggest Evilwm if lightweight is what you need. Plus the fullscreen option makes it a nice WM. Combine that with multiple desktops and you got yourself the most lightweight WM you could ever have. To make it even smaller (while removing some things) you can edit the makefile and disable info showing and multiple screens (and some other stuff aswell)
2. For tiling WM's I'd go with DWM or with LarsWM(I use larswm)
3. Fluxbox for a normal desktop
 
I used xmonad for a couple of months.

Very modular in fact imho it's the most flexible window manager I've came across. Loads of contrib modules for pretty much anything.

On the downside it does have ghc as a dependency.

Give it a go especially if you like tiling window managers.
 
A slightly different, but similar question: which desktop environments are fairly fast and configurable from GUI at the same time?

I use XFCE right now, but I'm looking for alternatives just to have some choice.
 
easier to download, say, a pre-written fvwm2rc from
somewhere than to install a WM and configure it from
scratch. (that is an alternative, not specifically what
you asked in your question). I usually find a few and
test each one, and one or two of the larger ones already
incorporate the learning curve and configuration.
 
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