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Recently I’ve been trying out alternative ways to interact with the computer. As I am now using linux as my main OS (Arch Linux136 FTW!), it’s really easy to try out alternative window managers (WMs). I tried some dynamic tiling WMs at first, including wmii137 and awesome138. They both work by auto arranging the windows so that they don’t overlap showing you your current working window in a bigger frame and the others in smaller frames. Check out their sites for more details and screenshots. I kinda liked the “non-overlapness” of it, but all of them lacked some flexibility in the creation of panes, and tried to be “too smart” in the placement and sizing of frames, so I couldn’t have absolute control on the tiling if I wanted to.rnI then decided to try a “dumber” WM, namely ratpoison. In this one, you only have one frame to begin with and swap the current application which is displayed fullscreen. If you want to use a more elaborate layout, you can split your screen horizontally or vertically and resize the resulting frames (much like emacs or vi). If you have ever used screen (which by the way, is the best CLI app ever, so go try it!) you will feel instantly at home as the functionality and keybindings are both similar.

I must say I’m loving it, I use it with a very simple dzen bar (showing the time). It’s great for those times when you’re left without your fellow rodent, either because you’re using your laptop on your lap, or because you forgot to bring a mouse. It’s also more productive because your hands don’t leave the keyboard for task switching. I’ve also been trying to replace most applications with mouseless alternatives. For firefox, there is this excelent lifehacker post with some keyboard shortcuts (that quote one is awesome, by the way). I also replaced some GUI intensive applications with lightweight CLI ones, so I am using herrie as my music player (it supports audioscrobbler, which is awesome!), and irssi + bitlbee as my irc + im client. I must say my system got a lot snappier using the lightweight apps and WM, and that’s awesome! I would post a screenshot, but really, ratpoison screenshots are not that interesting (unless you want to see a glorified date output in my dzen…). It makes you wonder though, why the hell do we use overlapping windows with decorations all the time if they only cover up information and are generally unpractical. I’ve read some interesting articles and discussions online about human computer interface, and I must say that I have to agree with a lot of the points made. Something should change, particularly for power users. The flexibility the console offers you shouldn’t be replaced by less flexible alternatives for the sake of eye candy.

Anyway, this is not a WM for everyone, but if you like your stuff as lightweight as possible then you can’t go wrong with ratpoison, so try it. And the code base is tiny so you can easily know what the hell is going on under the hood, if you feel like it. I would also love to try going X-less, and using screen as my “window manager” but the internet isn’t making it easy for me with all the flashy sites. It would be cool if all sites could fallback to a content-centric mode for text browsers, but I’m daydreaming again…