Window manager draft

content/rambles/windowmanagers.md

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+---
+title: "On window managers and XMonad"
+date: "2022-11-03T23:17:35+01:00"
+author: "$HUMANOID"
+tags: ["linux", "window managers"]
+description: "A ramble about a highly configurable window manager"
+---
+
+# My journey into Tiling Window Managers
+
+When I started my Linux journey, I stuck with GNOME 3something for around the
+first year. Sure, I tried KDE and Cinnamon and XFCE, but GNOME is the one I
+always kept coming back to. I think it's because it's pretty much the only one
+that felt completely different from what the rest of the world was doing. It
+helped me with thinking about Linux as being different from windows. After this
+first your though, I came across a few videos about tiling window managers and
+wanted to try one. The first one I installed was i3.
+
+I hated it.
+
+I had a hard time configuring it as I didn't really know what I was doing. Other
+than that, I found it plain awkward to use. The way it tiles windows -- and how
+you _still_ have to babysit pretty much every last one of them -- drives me away
+from i3 to this day. I'm sure it has the potential to be a great window manager.
+It's just _really_ not for me. Which is a shame, I would really like to properly
+live in Wayland with Sway for at least a little while.
+
+After a few hours of trying to get things to work in i3, I went back to GNOME.
+Some time later, I came across AwesomeWM. It was being recommended as a fairly
+easy window manager to start with -- it also having window decorations and it's
+own menu system. The first thing I did was try-and fail to rip out said menu
+system and window decorations. I was putting too much on myself trying to learn
+the basics of both using a tiling window manager and Lua.
+
+Some time after that, I came across BSPWM. This was the first time where I felt
+like I _really_ managed to get a tiling window manger to do what I wanted it to
+do. For some odd reason, there are people out there who consider BSPWM a more
+"advanced" window manger. I really don't get why. To this day, I am of the
+opinion that SXHKD's configuration syntax is some of the best out there. I think
+it took me around 10 minutes to wrap my head around the basics. Somewhere around
+an afternoon later, I had a config that served well me for the next few months
+to come. 
+
+A while after BSPWM, I decided to give suckless' DWM a shot. Despite my lack of
+knowledge of C, this very quickly became my favorite window manager at the time.
+There is just something about the insanity of using diff files to configure your
+piece of software when perfectly functional configuration libraries and
+languages exist that got it's hooks in me. I also caught the minimalism bug
+around this time, so DWM's nearly non-existent memory footprint was also great.
+Despite this really being the first really "advanced" window manager, I had an
+easier time configuring it than AwesomeWM or i3. It was also the first time
+where I could appreciate the master-stack layout properly and not having to
+think about keeping track of windows in two dimensions any more. It made me
+realise that I want to have to think as little as possible about window
+positioning. It was the reason I couldn't deal with i3's paradigm and shifted
+away from BSPWM the moment I found DWM.
+
+I ran DWM as my main window manger for over a year before having issues with
+some fullscreen applications and the JetBrains suite, which I had to use for
+college activities.
+
+{{< img class="stickers" link="https://xkcd.com/1806/" src="/images/xkcd/borrow_your_laptop.png" >}}
+
+I decided to give AwesomeWM another shot after having figured out what I want
+from a tiling window manger. This time I managed to get something that worked
+pretty much exactly how I wanted it to. In other words, a fairly basic
+configuration with most of the default features ripped out and instead my
+partially-organically-grown-probably-batshit-insane-keybindings (I use `Super` +
+`Space` to open my run launcher. In fact, on my keyboard I have holding the big
+space bar (yes it has two space bars, it is about as insane as my window
+management keybindings) bound to `Super` + `Space`).
+
+To this day I still use DWM quite frequently on machines where I don't really
+want to think about what graphical interface to chuck on it (hence I half
+arsedly maintain an Alpine package of my fork).
+
+For quite a long time I used DWM and AwesomeWM depending on whether I was
+planning on frequently using fullscreen applications and how strong the machine
+in question was; AwesomeWM being noticeably slower than DWM on _really_ old
+machines (like RejuvinatedBrick). Until at some point, I came across XMonad.
+
+I tried it.
+
+Hated the fact that it's configured in _sodding Haskell_ and went back to DWM.
+
+A few months later, I came across it's implementation of chorded keys through
+the `XMonad.Util.EZConfig` module and decided to give it another shot.
+
+This time I was hooked.
+
+The biggest problem I had with it was _still_ the fact that it was configured in
+Haskell, but the level of configurability made it worth dealing with the
+functional pain. It was also the first time I decided to not bother with a
+status bar as getting a basic configuration going had given me enough grief for
+one month.