Recently I’ve been trying out alternative ways to interact with the computer. As I am now using linux as my main OS (Arch Linux FTW!), it’s really easy to try out alternative window managers (WMs). I tried some dynamic tiling WMs at first, including wmii and awesome. 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.
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