{"id":4890,"date":"2013-04-07T09:45:01","date_gmt":"2013-04-07T13:45:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4890"},"modified":"2014-03-06T06:58:58","modified_gmt":"2014-03-06T11:58:58","slug":"out-on-the-tiles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4890","title":{"rendered":"Out on the tiles"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been experimenting with tiling window managers recently. I tried out awesome and xmonad, and read documentation on several others including dwm and wmii.  The prompt cause is that I&#8217;ve been doing a lot of surgery on large repositories recently, and when you get up to 50K commits that&#8217;s enough to create serious memory pressure on my 4G of core (don&#8217;t laugh, I tend to drive my old hardware until the bolts fall out). A smaller, lighter window manager can actually make a difference in performance.<\/p>\n<p>More generally, I think the people advocating these have some good UI arguments &#8211; OK, maybe only when addressing hard-core hackers, but hey we&#8217;re users too. Ditching the overhead of frobbing window  sizes and decorations in favor of getting actual work done is a kind of austerity I can get behind.  My normal work layout consisted of just three big windows that nearly filled the screen anyway &#8211; terminal, Emacs and browser. Why not cut out the surrounding cruft?<\/p>\n<p>I wasn&#8217;t able to settle on a tiling wm that really satisfied, though, until my friend HedgeMage pointed me at i3.  After a day or so of using it I suspect I&#8217;ll be sticking with it.  The differences from other tiling wms are not major but it seems just enough better designed and documented to cross a threshold for me, from interesting novelty to useful tool.  Along with this change I&#8217;m ditching Chatzilla for irsii; my biggest configuration challenge in the new setup, actually, was teaching irssi how to use libnotify so I get visible IRC activity cues even when irsii itself is hidden.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>One side effect of i3 is that I think it increases the expected utiliity of a multi-monitor configuration enough to actually make me shell out for a dual-head card and another flatscreen &#8211; the documentation suggests (and HedgeMage confirms) that i3 workspace-to-display mapping works naturally and well.  The auxiliary screen will be all browser, all the time, leaving the main display for editing and shell windows.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not quite a perfect fit.  The i3 model of new-window layout is based on either horizontally or vertically splitting parent windows into equal parts.  While this produces visually elegant layouts, for some applications I&#8217;d like it to try harder to split space so that the new application gets its preferred size rather than half the parent.  In particular I want my terminal emulators and Emacs windows to be exactly 80 columns unless I explicitly resize them.  I&#8217;ve proposed some rules for this on the i3 development list and may try to implement them in the i3 codebase.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not quite used to the look yet.  On the one hand, seeing almost all graphics banished from my screen in favor of fixed-width text still seems weirdly retro, almost as though it were a reversion to the green screens of my youth.  On the other hand, we sure didn&#8217;t have graphical browsers in another window then. And the effect of the whole is &#8230; <em>clean<\/em>, is the best way I can put it.  Elegant.  Uncluttered. I like that.<\/p>\n<p>Even old Unix hands like me take the Windows-Icons-Mouse-Pointer style of interface for granted nowadays, but i3 does fine without the I in WIMP. This makes me wonder how much of the rest of the WIMPiness of our interfaces is a mistake, an overelaboration, a local peak in design space rather than a global one.<\/p>\n<p>I was willing enough to defend the CLI for expert users in <cite>The Art of Unix Programming<\/cite>, and I&#8217;ve put my practice where my theory is in designing tools like reposurgeon.  Now I wonder if I should have been still more of an &#8211; um &#8211; iconoclast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been experimenting with tiling window managers recently. I tried out awesome and xmonad, and read documentation on several others including dwm and wmii. The prompt cause is that I&#8217;ve been doing a lot of surgery on large repositories recently, and when you get up to 50K commits that&#8217;s enough to create serious memory pressure&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4890\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Out on the tiles<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4890"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4892,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4890\/revisions\/4892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}