LeftWM is like XMonad but without the Haskell/Hassle

[@aethanfoot2103]

Hi DT, thanks for the video. We are always trying to evolve and have many plans to improve things. One thing made possible recently, is that you can disable the builtin keybind daemon when compiling leftwm through cargo features (you can also choose the logging built with leftwm), we do need to add better documentation on this. This is to allow users to use there own keybind daemon without the "bloat" left over (we are developing a keybind daemon, lefthk, but this is still in early beta). Thank you!

[@sergiuoanes4635]

you guys are doing an amazing job with LWM. I couldn't find a better TWM to do a better job for me as a wide screen user. Keep up the good work!!

[@web3wizard381]

i hope there are no trannies in the team

[@milohoffman274]

The keychord solution is simply to move all your non-WM stuff into sxhkd, where you can have all the keychords you want. It also makes it much easier to switch/swap between window managers because all you have to configure in the WM is the window management stuff, and all the other stuff can stay in sxhkd which you can use with any window manager. Makes configuring window managers much easier and cleaner too, much less to configure directly in the wm.

[@TurntableTV]

Somewhere in the future, DT will make a video with the following title: "RightWM is like LeftWM but without the Rust/Angst".

[@sprinklednights]

Banger

[@sav7775]

Does one use Holy C to config RightWM?

[@anon_y_mousse]

Makes me want to write one and call it that. Although, I wouldn't use a programming language for the configuration.

[@milohoffman274]

FYI, the "Left" is not political, it is from Zork type text adventure games where you have to type "Go Left" in the beginning of the game.

[@anon_y_mousse]

@@milohoffman274 GitHub page shows 95.7% Rust, so yeah, it is political, no matter what lies they tell to obscure their true purpose.

[@muddyexport5639]

Thanks and a good job. Always enjoy the tech talks vs the talk talks.

[@unicorn_tamer]

God, I just spent three whole days switching from dwm to XMonad and haskell made me want to jump out of the window.

[@DistroTube]

>haskell made me want to jump out of the window. I know what you mean. Haskell used to make me jump out of a window. Thankfully, I live in a one-story house.

[@unicorn_tamer]

@@DistroTube Yeah, me too!

[@haquire]

@@DistroTube Too bad youtube doesn't support native markdown.

[@tailsorange2872]

@@DistroTube Haskell is as sane-worthy as a mad man

[@anon_y_mousse]

@@haquire It *kind* of does, if the tuber turns on certain options.

[@defnlife1683]

DT you're awesome. Thank you for this. It's awesome that they're innovating and continue to dev Leftwm. we're spoiled for choice. "RON is a simple readable data serialization format that looks similar to Rust syntax. It's designed to support all of Serde's data model, so structs, enums, tuples, arrays, generic maps, and primitive values. "

[@pedroprobst5230]

Yeah RON is very cool. Similar to JSON but waaay better. I used it when I wrote my game.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

"RON is a simple readable data serialization format" Funnily enough, so is plain text - it just depends on how you lay it out. It doesn't need a special suffix just to keep the Rust fanboys happy.

[@defnlife1683]

@@terrydaktyllus1320 C is also easy to read. Smh. I can't, for the life of me, stop thinking that Rust is heading the way of C++ with a lot of syntax bloat. It's going to be impossible to parse.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

@@defnlife1683 I've nothing against Rust per se - if it generates fast and stable code then I welcome it. But I heard all this "it's more secure" and "it's more stable" bullcrap when Java first came out and as someone who works in cyber-security, Java is a nightmare. If Rust changes "the world of coding" then that will become evident when Rust applications are in widespread use in 5 or 10 years - not as a result of speculations of today's fanboys.

[@defnlife1683]

@@terrydaktyllus1320 aye

[@inisterr]

I love how good your configs look. When I see your wm videos, I'm amazed how pretty they are. It's inspiring 🤩

[@ofekshochat9920]

currently using leftwm! awesome (pun intended) stuff!

[@synen]

Thank you DT, what a great channel that you have.

[@ibrahim_alukraini]

Finally, video about LetfWM.

[@eduardiliasenco2534]

And as I see it has multiple screens support out of the box, which I had issues with having xmonad. Thanks for sharing!

[@Danielddiniz]

Hurray 🎉 another Tiling WM video ❤

[@PestisNonSapien_GMO_exHuman]

If you like the old config format then continue to use it. After every update run a script that copies the old format file to the correct directory and converts it.

[@sergiuoanes4635]

there's no better TWM for wide screens that Left. Always evolving, always there to help you when you need.....and it's written in Rust :).

[@fojico1234]

Ron is holding me back, toml is nice

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

I have been using XFCE for many years (essentially since GNOME 2 died albeit with a brief spell on MATE which I just found too buggy) but have dabbled with i3 for maybe 3 or 4 years now. I have been working with dwm and I like it for what it is but I am not a member of "the Church of Luke Smith" and don't want to just download his (or anyone else's) config files and blindly use them. Instead I have been patching and configuring my own dwm build from scratch, with some success so far. Because my employer gave me my old Core i5 Dell laptop to do with as I please following an upgrade, I had a spare machine on which I decided to do a brand new and slim build of Gentoo Linux on (as a Gentoo user for almost 20 years now) and to only have a tiling window manager on it. My dwm build is not ready, so I went with i3 gaps and i3blocks as a bar and I am very much liking it now I spent most of last weekend setting it up. Suddenly dwm doesn't seem that important to me any more. I really don't understand the fascination with hopping between tiling window managers. As far as I am concerned, a tiling window manager is the simplest and lightest desktop GUI that you can have, so simple that I really don't see how any other tilers can be doing any much different, or better, to what i3 is already doing for me anyway. i3 has this reputation as being "for newbies" but, putting my "engineer's hat" on for a moment, it does what it needs to do using a logical set of configuration commands for someone who started using Linux in 1997, UNIX eight years before that, and working with Linux for the past 20 years. I don't feel that I need to, say, learn Haskell for what appear to be no advantages of using xmonad over i3 - apart from "bragging rights". And call me "old fashioned" but flat text .conf files and the occasional .h files have been fine for configuration options for me for decades - so I fail to see why I need to start caring about "toml", "yaml", "camel", "llama" "okapi" or whatever new config file format some "software fashionista trying to make a name for itself" comes up with. When your video started, the desktop you showed us could have been created with any number of tiling window managers and bar combinations - so I don't see that LeftWM either gives me anything that i3 doesn't. So, my question is - what's all the fuss about? All tiling window managers essentially do the same thing.

[@Tala2n]

I use bspwm that has auto-tiling. For me it is an important difference with i3.

[@t0m5k1]

Great vid DT, never heard of leftwm but the lack of additional mod key's would be a killer for me too. I've WM jumped a few times and always find myself back in awesome or xfce. I have a session for each and a combined one. Can't see me running through the basmati process again for either of these anytime soon but I do have a nifty script to change the colours of my awesome theme if I fancy something different.

[@milohoffman274]

The latest LeftWM releases are great. I just switched over to it from Qtile. I think it is finally getting up to the level of the others like DWM/Xmonad/SpectrRM.

[@xenio8736]

So do you still use it and what are you thoughts vs qtile ?

[@milohoffman274]

@@xenio8736 LeftWM was great. Qtile is great. But since this is 9 months ago, I have moved onto Hyprland, which I think will be my new long term tiler and will be the go-to window manager to use in Wayland.

[@alexandrudan3794]

Hey DT, I was wondering why you prefer XMonad over other Tiling Window Managers (ex: Qtile or Awesome).

[@carlod1605]

RightWM when?

[@richardmonroe4208]

Been using leftwm since Erik Dubois became addicted to it and caused my addiction. The theming aspect was/is the main feature for me.

[@eyssewieringa2084]

Hey DT, will you take a look hyprland?

[@umop3plsdn]

I too have jumped all over the place. i've literally used every obscure wm or compositor out there since my linux journey started in 1995 and what i have found is HYPRLAND IS #1 !! This is coming from an X apologist as well! I will fight this to the death

[@ArniesTech]

Oh please dont get me started on DE/WM-hopping. 😵‍💫 Compared to that my distro hopping is a kids play 🤣

[@slipcurve1410]

i have one terminal emulator with tmux, often in fullscreen, and a browser. not to be dismissive, but i don't know why i should care about a window manager. gnome doesn't get in the way so it's fine. tiling means almost nothing if it's just tmux with bunch of nvim in it. gnome can "tile" the screen 50 50 if i want to watch a video while i code. what else? oh yeah, games are mostly fullscreen. on top of everything, you don't want to tile your screen real-estate away to tiny pieces, because you can't concentrate on more than one thing at a time anyway. i really can't think of why this is a problem that needs solving (let alone a scripting language to control it), but i'm glad that there are options if i change my mind.

[@AndersJackson]

Quit window manager and Linux distribution hopping are usually a sign on getting mature and concentrate at other things. 🙂

[@edbeckerich3737]

If sxhkd can resolve the keyboard short cuts, than I might replace my Xmonad install with it. I configured more Xmobar than Xmonad so I don't loose much if anything, except for window swallowing..

[@hanshofman]

Add sxhkd and this can give you the missing key-chords

[@merCUriumTM]

Build leftwm with `cargo build --no-default-features` and you can use sxhkd as your hotkey daemon

[@aleemont]

Hi DT, will you try hyprland wm? I think its NEAT :):)

[@holly_hacker]

I'm not a fan of RON as a configuration file for a WM. It mimics the rust syntax so it's meant as a config file that rust developers use, not end users. KDL or TOML would have been a way better choice.

[@anon_y_mousse]

Speaking as a programmer, I'm not a fan of programming languages as configuration files. Might be okay for build environments, but definitely not for something that end users see.

[@ioneocla6577]

Welp you could Say the same for every window manager configured with a programming language like awesome qtile dwm or Xmonad

[@anasouardini]

I've never wrote anything huge like these window managers. but why they don't like the idea making their config files a part of the project itself? like dwm does with their config.h header file they don't need to parse the config as a string, it's gonna be all variables and objects etc or at least why not use a really known language since the parser is gonna be available instead of re-inventing the wheel?

[@merCUriumTM]

The `leftwm-core` is the core library and can actually be used pretty much in the way dwm is configured or to build with any parser that supports the `serde` datamodel. `leftwm` is just the "baseline" implementation to this library.

[@lostyrevived1540]

I got really bored of xmonad, thanks dt

[@shivampatel4461]

which zsh theme is that ? (with big #!)

[@user-gt7yp6lg1l]

that is his colorscripts.

[@denisshkerin7374]

DT great review as always! About Keychords: How to Use Keychords in Any Window Manager: kzbin.info/www/bejne/qnTaaZt6Z9V3j5I may come in handy!

[@sasan8822]

RightWM is better

[@haquire]

Haskell isn't hard.

[@FADHsquared]

Just because you're a "math specialist" doesn't mean everybody is

[@haquire]

@@FADHsquared I'm not even close to a "math specialist," its just not hard to write haskell (even at a beginner level)

[@FADHsquared]

@@haquire What's a monad again?

[@haquire]

@@FADHsquared A monoid inside the category of endofunctors. You of course don't need to know any category theory use Monads.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

Unless someone can prove to me that programming xmonad in Haskell gives me anything more than just using a flat text .conf file in i3 then I will state simply that "Haskell is unnecessary".

[@electricalstuff259]

This is why linux power users confuse me. There's essentially no difference but people do whole videos on the benefits of switching to X Y or Z. Am i the only one who looks at it as an end user? Like i literally don't care what text editor i use - it's just a notepad. I don't care about the window manager - as long as i can use it. Other linux peeps seem to really care about small, inconsequential parts of their systems.

[@DarkVeilGaming]

I mean, doesn't that apply to "power" users of any device? I don't care about cars at all - it go vroom vroom, it gets me from A to B I don't care what it is or what it really looks like. People who care about cars and their internals confuse me! Why would you care about something that's just used for transportation? But I don't judge ;) Nothing wrong with getting nitty-gritty with things you enjoy and customizing it as much as you can! Besides, that's Linux's motto - Customization.

[@electricalstuff259]

@@DarkVeilGaming It's not that it's that when they talk about these things you'd think there was something significant there. Like we see loads of 'first look at X distro' and it's essentially exactly the same as the previous iteration with a few minor things that change absolutely nothing about the distro. Like why would you care what wallpapers it came with when you can just create your own wallpapers? A more fair analogy imo is someone caring that they changed the radiator tubes on the latest model of the car, and the tube does exactly what the previous tube did, literally no difference.

[@nesper8]

Just use GNOME

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

A truly self aware person would know not to post a silly comment under a video it clearly has no interest in in the first place.

[@elomuskreal]

man i love GNOME, it's so beautiful but it has it's flaws, i'd prefer a wm

[@marcoturchetto7495]

Haskell it's not a hassle 🥲

[@owoled282]

Have you read the Arch wiki of Haskell ? Specifically where it explains dynamic linking. That's sounds like a hassle to me