1 yr. ago • 90%

What is your favourite floating window manager?

Hi there, I'm looking at floating window mangers as an in-between of DEs and escaping configuration hell (somewhat) of tiling Window Managers.

Specifically, I was looking at IceWM and OpenBox, but would love recommendations and discussion on what you like and why.

Cheers!

36 comments

The best one was enlightenment DR16, but it has been discontinued.

It gave the option to remember the position of the first window per application and per a criteria you could set. Like "remember I want the Window titled Calendar from class calendar on the right of the screen".

Each theme would bring a set of different border styles and you could change them from the title bar menu and have it remember that. It was very easy to customize themes. The borders could have transparent sections, eg. your theme could have the window title in a bubble floating a few pixels away from the window.

Windows could be stickied, so when you switch virtual desktops, the calendar would follow.

It had pagers to show what's going on on other virtual desktops, so you could see when your downloads finished even if the program didn't use notifications.

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- I'm pretty sure KDE's window manager, kwin, can do all of those things through kwin scripts and window rules, except the pager doesn't show the details of windows on other desktops, just the outline.
  
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- This sounds amazing!!! Too bad it's gone...
  
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- This was a fun one! Now, I use Gnome, after I discontinued my own fork of catwm called ocelot (but this was a tiling wm based on dwm, anyway).
  
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- This sounds like my dream windows manager but it's dead. Happiest and saddest news.
  
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fvwm is super-old-school but incredibly flexible.

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- Thanks, I'll try this. I think with a bit of config and a better theme this would be great
  
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Try pop_os. It's gnome tiling can be enabled and disabled from the top bar and it's defaults are sane and easy to change.

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- Thanks, but I'm trying to avoid DEs for the most part. I'll keep this in mind though
  
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I use glazier, a WM I wrote myself. But given your description, it won't fit you at all ^^ It's very bare bones, and requires that you script everything not mouse driven using wmutils.

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- Ah, like bspwm then.
  
  If I was younger, I'd jump on the idea to be able to configure everything to my liking and making a "perfect" setup. However, I want to reach a compromise between a lean system and something which has sane defaults OOTB. Your setup seems fantastic but it's going to take me a week or so, which is not what I want to do. Thank you for mentioning your project though.
  
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OpenBox & Xfwm. I'm keeping an eye on labwc, which is a new openbox clone for wlroots. It's already suitable for everyday use.

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- Thanks for the suggestions. Do you think I can get away with running just xfwm4 instead of the entire XFCE DE? I'm trying to stay light, which is why I would like to avoid DEs for the most part.
  
  Isn't labwc just a compositor?
  
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  I've run plain ol' openbox without a desktop environment on top of it, and it's quite nice. IIRC I also had a standalone status bar application, but I can't remember which one I used.
  
  There are a couple utility programs (obconf and obkey?) that help to configure everything comfortably.
  
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  You'll also want a root window and other essential features. This is provided by xfdesktop4 (or you can use an equivalent from another DE). You can use just the window manager if you want but you won't like it. Or you can use something like Openbox which includes everything needed (it's a tiny complete DEs not just a window manager).
  
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Awesome or Hikari. Depends on X11 vs Wayland.

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- Thanks!
  
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For X, I'd probably go for Openbox. For Wayland, I have tried Hikari, but it reminded me why I don't like floating window managers, so I don't use it, but it seems really cool! Also, there is labwc which is supposed to be an Openbox replacement for Wayland, but I can't tell you anything about it cuz I haven't tried it.

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This stick I use so that my window doesn't slam closed

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The Xfce one. I don't see the point of simple WM for floating windows. I use a WM because it is the only solution for a proper tiling window manager.

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I suggest jwm!

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- Thanks, I'll take a look
  
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dwm for anything other than gaming. no close competition imho

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- Why would you use dwm for floating windows?
  
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  oops
  
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- dwm's so good. It has pretty much everything one would need and once you've set it up, no need to change anything.
  
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- What about dwm makes it a more appealing choice compared to XMonad? (Excluding the C vs Haskell argument)
  
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  i dont have much experience with xmonad but i tried every wm at some point. usually the things that keep me with dwm is that i found a build with very sane defaults and a number of patches i appreciate like swallowing, fake fullscreen(so you can fullscreen a program inside the assigned window) or xresources/pywal integration . i also love the scratchpad implementation and the tag system with a tag 0. i also like dwmblocks for the status bar . now im sure some of this features are available on other wm but i never found all of them in one like on DWM.
  
  i also use ST as terminal and it works great with dwm while it gives me issues with other WM(usually resizing issues)
  
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