I really wish the full potential of compositing window managers could have been fulfilled, instead of the tech behind them being used for mostly eye candy.<p>Here are two items that should be doable with compositing. First, when giving a presentation with an external monitor, I'd like to tag specific windows to be mirrored (and scaled, if appropriate) on the secondary monitor. That way I can still be messing with my instant messages or email in private (which you can't do if you are mirroring your whole screen), yet be able to easily work with content that the audience is also viewing (by no having to shift my head from my laptop screen up to the projector all the time). This would be similar to using online meeting software where you share specific windows.<p>The second item, that you can sort of do now but not cleanly, is have multiple mice and keyboards, so that a mouse that selects a given window gives its associated keyboard input focus to that window. While the other mouse/keyboard combo is working with a different window. This would be great for pair programming, especially with a multi-windowed shared buffer editor (like what Emacs can do).<p>You can do this now, with some editing in the X config file, but there is no indication on the screen which window currently is focused to which keyboard -- this can be accomplished with the WM changing the window border or title bar color as appropriate.
If anyone wants a trip down the memory lane, <a href="http://www.xwinman.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.xwinman.org/</a> is still up.<p>A long, long time ago -- but still quite some time after it stopped being (too) regularly maintained -- I emailed Matt Chapman to ask him to include my WM in the list. He never answered, thank God, that was my first piece of non-trivial X11 code and it was absolutely gruesome, I don't know what the hell I was thinking.
I was a long time KDE user, then went to light weight wm I switched around from fluxbox, openbox. Then I went to tiling window managers. Which is where I'm at today. I have a screen shot of my old xmonad setup.. <a href="http://i.imgur.com/c4HGAEs.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/c4HGAEs.png</a><p>But now I'm using i3, as managing haskell crap is kind of a pita.
i3 is one of my favorite pieces of software. I’m currently writing a clone of it for ChromeOS (as best as the Chrome API will allow anyway).<p>I think it’s a shame you can’t get something like i3 on OSX or Windows. It’s a primary reason I stick to Linux.
I've used i3wm and quite liked it. Simple, efficient and easy to setup. I'd properly propose i3 for anyone wanting to taste what a tiling window manager is like. I don't think it's competitors are nearly as easily configurable but I only have experience with i3wm so I cannot say for sure.
I've been using Awesome on Debian Stable for years. I haven't configured it very much, and I mostly use it to keep everything full screen all the time. I'm sure at some point the X Window System will be completely abandoned and I'll have to move on to something else, but I haven't figured out what that something else is, just yet.
I think I went:<p>twm -> olwm -> mwm<p>I then stopped faffing about with such things (after spending huge amounts of time getting configuration <i>just so</i>) and over the years started increasingly just to go with defaults for most things.
FVWM has a graphical configuration program. Also it has a window switching widget you can put in the tiny window with the pager and stuff.<p>I use cwm now though because it just gets out of the way and does it’s job.
I used gnome2 for a while, then eventually moved to awesomewm when gnome-shell was announced, but I've settled on dwm as my wm of choice. It does what I want and nothing else.
My favourite X Window website has always been Kenton Lee's:
<a href="http://www.rahul.net/kenton/index.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.rahul.net/kenton/index.shtml</a><p>(from the '90's anyway.)
I have a basic environment I take with me across distros and across time: Window Maker, xterm, zsh, and Emacs. I have configuration files for all of them, and the combination makes me fairly insensitive to distro as long as it has a reasonable package repository and dependency-tracking package management.
To pharaphase Tuomo Valkonen (creator of the tiling window manager ion), most of these should not be called window managers since they make you manage the windows.<p>I use ratpoison and GNU screen.<p>These wikipedia lists can be quite helpful, even if they are often out of date and incomplete.
I love the variety of styles and customizability. It’s really impressive to see some of the designs people have over at reddit.com/r/unixporn . I want to jump in but then realize how much of a time sink it can be.
I prefer <a href="https://github.com/serprex/nobox" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/serprex/nobox</a> (which isn't on wiki's list)<p>Only using 3 pages of RAM is pretty good
lxde worked well for me and memory footprint is totally good.<p>still the GUI for embedded linux device is lacking, Android unifies that but it's more for phones loaded with a huge chunk of bloat-ware for other non-phone use cases.<p>I have been looking for embedded-linux-GUI for a long while, but I'm happy with gnome/lxde on Desktops.