cwm - Anyone else like this option for a window manager?

[Shadow_7]

http://martintoft.dk/?p=cwm

I was watching a BSD podcast and an author of several technical books was quite avid about using cwm, the calm window manager. So I set out to see what it was all about. The above link is for a linux variant, not available in repositories, but compiles happily on my wheezy and jessie installs. After grabbing a few -dev packages. And, well, I like it.

The cwm window manager is a little odd to get used since it's all hotkeys and mouse navigation. There's no taskbar, no window decorations, it's literally a black screen with not so much as a cursor when you start X. Using Cntrl + Alt + Enter launches an xterm. Literally which is where most of your wm interfacing will take place. The man page is really short and the functionality is quite intuitive if you're an old command line guy like me. What I like most about it, is that everything seems faster. Noticeably faster, on this old 1.9GHz dual core. According to free it's roughly 20k smaller than IceWM on startup and launching nothing but an xterm.

I'm just curious if others are using this one. It seems like it might be well suited for an RPI, if one must have a gui, but still do most things on the CLI.

Cntrl + Alt + Enter == xterm
Cntrl + Alt + f == fullscreen
Cntrl + Alt + x == exit
Alt + Down cursor == lower a window / inactive, but it doesn't minimize
Alt + Up cursor == raises a window / active
Alt + Left mouse click and drag == move a window
Alt + Middle mouse click and drag == resize a window

And other options on a relatively short list of options in the man page. It's a bit old school with hovering the mouse over for active window. But it seems that it's designed to be used with absolutely no mouse. The extra pixels of screen real-estate is kind of nice. No 26x pixel tall taskbar. No 16x pixel tall window decoration. I can fit a lot of stuff on screen now and I don't need to pass --borderless in a lot of cases. I just found it neat and thought that I'd share my find.

[Shadow_7]

If you try it and don't like it.

Cntrl + Alt + Shift + Q == get out of the X environment

Otherwise the usual Cntrl + Alt +F# works for another console to purge it old school.

[Shadow_7]

From a fresh debian 7.2.0 (wheezy) install I had to apt-get the following to compile cwm. Dependencies were grabbed and not listed here of course. Just an extract from the bash_history of root after installation. Not all of the packages listed were required for the compile. I tend to do the debootstrap method from a net install image. So it's a pretty minimal system.

apt-get install binutils debootstrap dselect apt-file linux-image-686
apt-get install build-essential xterm byacc libxrandr-dev libxinerama-dev libxft-dev binutils-dev
apt-get install w3m midori autoconf mercurial scons cvs subversion git libxt-dev

===== compile time =====

apt-get install b43-fwcutter firmware-b43-installer mesa-utils grub2
apt-get install xserver-xorg-core xfs xserver-xorg xfonts-100dpi xfonts-75dpi xfonts-scalable
apt-get install xinit x11-apps

.xinitrc == "exec cwm"

After fluidsynth and a few of the usual things. 2.6G of usage including the undeleted *.*deb's in /var/cache/apt/archive/. Pulseaudio, flash, iceweasel and youtube capable. But not java.

[Shadow_7]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcdq_A6gFv4

My first attempt at anything screen casting. And using cwm to show what it is, what it does, and how to function within it.