What Window Manager do you use on FreeBSD?

I have an ancient page on it. Much of it is about applying a patch that's no longer necessary, but the first parts of it, configuring the key files, might have some value.

http://srobb.net/fluxbox.html

(Note, I haven't updated it in a longggggg time, that 2014 date is just when I moved to a new server.)
 
Might seem like a silly question, and I know I can find out by trying, but I got too many hours invested now to jeopardize. Can gnome3 and/or xfce4 and/or kde4 coexist on the same OS installation, and then by editing a couple files a person can start up whichever desktop he/she wants? Or, (I'm guessing there is) key common files which will get written to by the last desktop installed and this the previous ones installed get broken.

I want to try a bunch of them at the same time, but a fellow can only have so many hard drives laying around. :D Let me guess.....jails is the answer. ;)
 
I have something not too different. In my ~/.profile I have
Code: 
WM=i3;     export WM
which is evaluated in ~/.xinitrc as
Code: 
exec $WM
as the last line. startx would launch x11-wm/i3. From time to time I run a script
Code: 
#!/bin/sh

WM=`/usr/bin/dialog --stdout --no-tags --menu "Window Manager" 15 25 5 i3 i3 jwm jwm fvwm fvwm fvwm-themes-start fvwm-themes-start twm twm startkde4 kde4`
export WM
startx
to choose a different window manager. This requires an initial login without a login manager.
 
Right now I use Window Maker, FVWM2, and Enlightenment DR16.

Now I'm waiting for CDE to be added to ports. Does anyone have any information about that? Surely, if Xplore can still be there, CDE is not too archaic for FreeBSD.
 
Right now iI use XFCE4, iI'm using FreeBSD from 3.2 as a desktop. A lot of years iI used Fluxbox as all time primary WM, before was TWM sometime, but last 2 years using XFCE4. Sometimes thinking to return to Fluxbox. But now Fluxbox all time as a backend for those time when something goes wrong. Maybe if Fluxbox get support some features and get some graphic config tools like XFCE4 - iI will get it primary again. My family using it as a desktop too :)
 
Somebody in here pointed me to x11-wm/i3. Now I realised how often you need a mouse to open and maximise a window. Most windows you never resize, because you want firefox, thunderbird, video-player or whatever full-screen. If you have got a bigger screen, you keep two or three applications on the desktop, but again need to rearrange them. Changing the active windows is most of the time clicking inside (active window) or on the task-bar (minised or in the background) Of course you could use Alt+Tab, but then again you need to pick from the icons your window. If it's two or three terminals, you are lost :)

i3 is kinda really cool, I humble have to admit that.
 
Patrick Bär said:
because?
Click to expand...
x11-wm/i3 is meant to be a keyboard-centric window manager to be as efficient as possible. :) As you've noticed, you can use the mouse as well, though it is meant to be used with keyboard shortcuts. Every window action and more can be bound to a shortcut. The documentation for i3 should explain what is possible, how to use it, and how to configure it.
 
A lot better than my speaking of the other language I speak . Rereading your post, it could also be taken as

Until I switched to using i3, I never realized how much I use a mouse to open or maximize a window in other window mangers. At worst, the sentence is ambiguous, and your English is probably better than many English speakers here. :)

I tend to use either x11-wm/dwm (another tiling manager) or x11-wm/openbox, but even with Openbox, I have a lot of keyboard shortcuts for opening, moving, and resizing windows.
 
Is it that there is no a complete guide to customize and configure Fluxbox? The wiki is confusing.
 
If I still used it, I'd try to write one. I've always concentrated on the keyboard shortcuts, and actually, at the time (early 2000's) found their man page to be pretty helpful--it was written by people who were really enthusiastic about it, I just remember lots of things like,
fluxbox makes this easy! :)
Click to expand...
(That is, the ! and smiley were in the man page.)

If you mention something specific you're trying to do, it's possible someone could help. (Though it might be better in a separate thread.)
 
John Call said:
Now I'm waiting for CDE to be added to ports. Does anyone have any information about that? Surely, if Xplore can still be there, CDE is not too archaic for FreeBSD.
Click to expand...

The CDE build system is very old, ad-hoc and annoying. It is quite hard to get it to install to /usr/local instead of /usr. This is unfortunately required in order to submit a port.
Other than this, it works really quite nicely as well as it ever did with only a few random segfaults in things like GUI builder.

I like CDE and interestingly it is one of the most complete working desktops available for BSD operating systems (since Gnome and KDE are always breaking things).
 
kpedersen said:
The CDE build system is very old, ad-hoc and annoying. It is quite hard to get it to install to /usr/local instead of /usr. This is unfortunately required in order to submit a port.
Other than this, it works really quite nicely as well as it ever did with only a few random segfaults in things like GUI builder.

I like CDE and interestingly it is one of the most complete working desktops available for BSD operating systems (since Gnome and KDE are always breaking things).
Click to expand...

CDE Needs serious tweaking, the Open version has a lot of bugs and barely works.
 
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