Why I Don't Care About My (Linux) Window Manager!

[@ApexFPS]

This is the kind of intermediate level Linux content I’ve been looking for, loved your last kvm video too. Looking forward to more of your videos

[@osxs333__7]

The algorithm has blessed me, a software engineer that’s fluent with Linux 💯💯

[@lorenzocabrini]

My window manager principles are quite simple. The most important one is don't interfere with Emacs. I have a few other requirements as well. One thing I do is add cards to Anki. This usally involves adding images and/or audio files. Since the PyQt file selector is slow, this is really the only time I use a GUI file manager (pcmanfm). With i3, I tab together the Anki main window and the add card window on the left and pcmanfm to the right. Very fast and it doesn't increase my stress level at all. A while ago I discovered sway, which is a wayland compositor that behaves a lot like i3. In my experience, it's not as laggy as i3, so now I'm fully on sway. There was a time when I was a lot younger and had time to play around with window managers. My favorite was fvwm, but I also liked WindowMaker, blackbox and Enlightenment (yeah, the one the was the default Gnome window manager for a while) and later Openbox. Nowadays, I'm really comfortable with sway and don't see myself changing any time soon. It fits my workflow perfectly.

[@unclefunctor8891]

Your back, awesome! Jetbrains is like hotel California. Once you check out you can never leave LoL.

[@nobloat5702]

This is some amazing content! I am glad to discover your channel. I am a TWM user but I love the idea behind your script and how it also doesn't unnecessarily complicates things

[@willernst]

Okay, I ended up watching this by accident when KZbin auto played it after a video ON a window manager and I almost backed out, but I’m glad it queued up! Great content , well-explained, well-paced, and well-produced. Some great ideas on here; now I’m off to explore the channel!

[@engageintellect]

Thanks to this video I am now 100% in control of my window manager/s. This is perfect for scripting!

[@troytian9041]

Another nice one. Learned something new from it, thank you. 😜

[@creativityhub1350]

Amazing work! I am implementing this into my workflow immediately!

[@patrickprucha5522]

Very Good Video and Very Good Prespective. Excellent Video! Very pertinent subject. I think we spend alot of time playing with our customizations, and less time on what we want to do. But heck, it's so fun :). I have a tendency to be of a similar type as yourself, with respect to not wasting time while doing a task. I definitely will review the video again to take notes on your lof script. I don't know, but if it was my tool, i would think it is very elegant. Elegant for me is clean, efficient, to the point, few lines. Cheers and many thanks! 👍

[@tonythai5991]

Wow, very efficient work flow. Thank you professor!

[@motif5775]

Great video! Thanks for your perspective, learned alot.

[@WK-47]

Nice video. The philosophy of DEs/WMs is strangely interesting, maybe because it's through them we do most of our work. I've been using Cinnamon quite happily for 6 years but for performance reasons mainly have started considering an alternative to it and pure tiling WMs. Xfce with xbindkeys (and maybe rofi) might be just what I'm looking for. Thanks!

[@MrRenanwill]

I liked the concept! If was able to know that before, probably I was using xfce since then. Now I'm using Rofi to launch apps and some keybinds, but usually Rofi. I'm trying to satisfy myself with my last step. I fell like that I am almost in a perfect setup but for some reason I don't convince myself about that and I get myself on and on "fixing" things.

[@AndrewErwin73]

Notice how KDE, Gnome, and XCFE were NOT in the list of stacking window managers? Cuz they are not. There is a distinct difference between a desktop environment and a window manager.

[@alejandromadail]

Seriously man, great video!

[@jorgegarreton9460]

awesome ideas!

[@lydstyl]

Really good video thanks.

[@FranciscoMarcosMilhomemAbreu]

This will be useful for my adhd. Thank you very much!

[@tiberiusvetus9113]

Nice simple workflow. One gap for me would be dealing with multiple browser instances, terminal instances.

[@sukhmandersingh4306]

@@joshrosso super + ` works on ubuntu i don't know about other distros. Super + tab works just like alt+tab.

[@ahmadbaghereslami796]

Great video, thanks

[@wjcferguson]

Launch-or-focus was built-in from day 1 in the Unity DE over a decade ago and it was immediately my workflow. It gave you Super+n, where n is the index of the app in the launch bar. First activity post-install was putting primary apps in those key first places, so then Super+1 summoned my editor, Super+2 browser, Super+3 terminal.... Unity was a great DE for keyboard drivability and low friction activity shifting. Using X Window Class is the classic way to identify the window, accepted by xdotool, avoiding the need to deal with titles. I agree with your fundamental point, and similarly I don't need much from a WM, but I definitely need it to do trivial tiling- managing windows side-by-side with the ability to easily adjust the divider.

[@ilyasabi8920]

Smart very useful I will keep this in mind

[@zinahe]

Thanks. That was enlightening. I like this kind of productivity-focused videos. How about some tips about vim/tmux ?

[@zinahe]

Oops! I just noticed you've already done a video on Vim. My bad :(

[@codermonk7552]

Thank you! This gave me great ideas :) I tried tiling wms too, but they get in my way instead of helping (I have the same priorities as you here pretty much).

[@twb0109]

New things will always get in your way though xd

[@eherrmann01]

Very interesting, thank you.

[@NrJuan]

I might have missed it but what happens if you have 2 firefox processes running and you then want to focus?

[@dlxpro9342]

Great video.

[@bastonUK]

Great video. Have you considered doing a shell scripting tutorial series?

[@bastonUK]

@@joshrosso There are not many tutorial series that go up in complexity while still demonstrating useful scripting. Do you have a way of supporting you like a patron or PayPal?

[@vladtymoshchyk9249]

Super interesting

[@yiannisspanos694]

The link for the blogpost is missing the docs/ part. It's broken.

[@returned_to_monke8872]

I learned git, patch, & diff by patching dwm (a lot) & uploading it to my github. Nice experience I must say.

[@yiannisspanos694]

I've seen this video 2 times now and I think that once I get some free time, I might implement it. What happens if you launch multiple firefox windows? Can lof handle that? I often have pairs of workspaces to do different things. i.e. A pair of workspaces for coding, and another for attending class and keeping notes. I end up having multiple instances of the same program when I'm hoping from task to task.

[@yiannisspanos694]

@@joshrosso I understand. It's a great script nonetheless.

[@iAmTheWagon]

This is really fkn cool

[@thallium54]

Your idea is really awesome but I found that xbindkeys doesn't respond instantly (at least slower than key bindings using my window manager).

[@thallium54]

@@joshrosso how could I check it?

[@kickbuttowsk2i]

enlightened

[@alejandromadail]

I cannot get this to work with dwm. wmctrl -R does not play well with dwm, not even wmctrl -a. I even patched it with focusonnetactive but no chance :(

[@wiswis]

that is because dwm is not an EWMH compliant Window Manager, I read somewhere there is a patch that adds it. wmctrl requires an EWMH compliant Window Manager.

[@engageintellect]

I was able to get this method working in dwm, spectrwm and bspwm. Read the tail end of “man wmctrl” and you should be able to get it working. As Josh mentions in this video, wmctrl is very picky about the information you give it. (and the syntax). But it does work... the trick for me was putting a “sleep .1” command between launching programs and running wmctrl on them, without the short sleep before it wasn’t working. Hope this makes sense.

[@WafflesOinc]

1:32 nice pun

[@noxx82]

3:15 🙂

[@kuhluhOG]

14:58 As a tip if you don't want to need to append an ampersand here, you can change in your script $APP_NAME to nohup $APP_NAME &

[@ablanchi]

This is good if you never want to see more than 1 window at a time. However, as soon as you want to reference your browser and your editor at the same time, you need the mouse.

[@mentalmarvin]

you kept moving and resizing your windows with the mouse

[@0xssff]

just use dwm lol

[@user-kw7qj2he5w]

this is real suckless mindset i think

[@weedeater64]

#!/bin/bash for i in $(wmctrl -lp | grep -i $1 | awk '{print $1}'); do wmctrl -iR $i; done