Trying ion3, the window manager (Shallow Thoughts)

Akkana's Musings on Open Source Computing and Technology, Science, and Nature.

Mon, 09 Aug 2004

Trying ion3, the window manager

Searching, as always, for the perfect window manager ...

Helix likes ion3, because it handles key accelerators very well, so I thought I'd try it.

I don't really like the "tiled or fullscreen" model it uses by default, but found the answer in the FAQ (after a rude RTFM comment which made no sense, since I already had RTFM and it doesn't give information on anything but runtime arguments): press F9 and get it to prompt for the type of the new workspace (the correct answer is the one with "Float" in the name).

All of the available themes use the "small grab handle around the title, but the rest of the titlebar isn't there" look. I don't like that (it's harder to find a place to grab to move windows around) though I suppose I could get used to it. Not a big deal.

It does look like it has good key binding support, and ways to specify different behavior for different apps, both of which would be very nice. Focus behavior on resize seems to be the same as openbox and icewm, though: if the window resizes out from under the cursor, it loses focus. Also the root menus (right-click) are a pain: they don't stay posted, and they're small, so it's hard to navigate them.

I'm sure ion3 has some coolnesses, but I decided that it didn't look likely enough to solve my problems to be worth learning how to configure it (and that unjustified RTFM left a bad taste in my mouth about how easy that configuration was likely to be). So I'm back on openbox for a little while, anyway.

Here's what I want out of a window manager:

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[ 18:36 Aug 09, 2004    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]

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