I am following Wouter’s example and returning to Fluxbox. I certainly thought ion3 was an interesting approach and it seemed like it would be exactly what I needed when I saw Erinn show it off to me in Helsinki. However, over time I developed too many gripes:
- I am a great fan of Enrico’s software, buffy in particular. I would
like to have
buffystick to ever workspace, ideally along the right edge. This seemed not trivially possible inion3, where I would have had to create a single static workspace with two panes, then put all my other workspaces into the pane next to the one reserved forbuffy. Certainly possible, but a major pain to configure and protect against resizing and accidental closing. - Applications like Firefox, dia, and especially The Gimp (to name but a few) were just a major pain to use, especially since I never got the hang of the floating workspace model. My favourite example (which is in line with Wouter’s experience): try to crop an image in The Gimp; by the time you set the first click, you’ll have the crop dialog in your face, which you have to first move out of the way before you can restart. * Certain transients would be locked to a size that made it impossible to fill in all fields, first requiring you to attach the window to a proper frame.
- The inability to display dock and status bar on the same head.
There were probably a couple of other minor issues that don’t pop to mind right now.
All that said, there are certain things I now miss in Fluxbox,
which had been my window manager of choice before Helsinki, that I
know what ion3 can do:
- The ability to use your keyboard to switch to a bordering
window; I had it set up so that Mod5-\ (Mod5 I tied to Caps_Lock)
would transfer focus to the window on the left/right/top/bottom. My
xinerama-switchermodule (part ofion3-scriptsnow) would allow that to work across multiple heads and workspaces. - Tagging and attaching a window to another pane, or using the
attachcommand directly to summon a window from somewhere else to the current pane. - While grun is a
worthy replacement for
ion3’s F3, I have not found something to replace F4, a prompt with autocompletion for SSH targets; I’ve really grown used to that. - The concise and extensible status reporting done by the various modules in the statusbar, like ACPI status (incl. temperature and CPU frequency), current IP address, WLAN status, and the three CPU load values. Dockapps just take way too much screen estate, and I don’t need no graphic frills when I want information.
… and possibly more. Maybe it’s time to look around again for a lightweight, keyboard-friendly window manager (and only that) that’s not WindowMaker?
