Show HN: Howm – A Vim-like tiling X11 window manager

https://github.com/HarveyHunt/howm

by hunt • 12 years ago

71 60 12 years ago

github.com

maikklein• 12 years ago

Interesting, but you really need to do some showcases.

TimGremalm• 12 years ago

I agree, please post some screenshots.

hunt8• 12 years ago

You're completely right- I forgot to upload them and then had no internet access.

This imgur album has a couple of gifs: http://imgur.com/a/8aqD9

dons• 12 years ago

How does this differ from e.g. xmonad, which uses vi-like keybindings? It's specifically the bulk operators based on movement?

deweerdt2• 12 years ago

xmonad isn't modal. This apparently has three modes: 'normal', 'floating' and 'focus'. i3 also has modes: 'normal' and 'resize'.

tomjakubowski• 12 years ago

i3 only has two modes by default. You can create whatever modes in i3 you like.

    set $mediamenu "media:  [spc] play/pause [p] prev [n] next"

    mode $mediamenu {
        bindsym space exec "playerctl play-pause; i3-msg mode default"
        bindsym p exec "playerctl previous"
        bindsym n exec "playerctl next"
        bindsym Escape mode "default"
        bindsym $mod+m mode "default"
    }

    bindsym $mod+m mode $mediamenu

Now $mod+m will enter 'media' mode, with its own set of keybindings.

dllthomas7• 12 years ago

XMonad can presumably be modal if you configure it as such. I've got some modal behaviour out of ratpoison by swapping out my top level key maps.

pweissbrod4• 12 years ago

One of the reasons I continue development work predominantly in windows OS is its vast support for mouse-free operability. I love vim for the same reason. I tried ratpoison in linux but found it to interfere with application keyboard shortcuts. I also tried AwesomeWM but it wasnt as graceful as the windows key in windows.

If someone was to solve this issue elegantly it would compel me to reconsider moving my daily development activities back to linux

rakoo3• 12 years ago

Hum... Are we talking about the same Windows ?

Have you tried other tiling window managers ? i3 [0] comes to mind, but XMonad [1] and Awesome WM [2] are 2 other popular choices in this domain. There are plenty of others to pick from, too [3].

[0] http://i3wm.org/

[1] http://xmonad.org/

[2] http://awesome.naquadah.org/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager

pmarsh• 12 years ago

I think like any system once you learn all the shortcuts available and use them on a daily basis trying other setups never seem quite as good.

deweerdt2• 12 years ago

There are plenty of others to pick from, too

Alternate link for WM reviews: 30 Window Managers in 30 days: http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=18273

sp3322• 12 years ago

In Windows, Alt-Space gives you a menu that lets you move and resize windows without using the mouse. Also in Windows 7 and 8, holding the Windows/Super key and tapping "left" or "right" causes apps to take up half the screen, and "up" maximizes.

mcginleyr1• 12 years ago

I always liked Ion3 a lot despite the conflicts the author had with distros. http://notion.sourceforge.net/ is a fork of it that is maintained.

pweissbrod4• 12 years ago

Thats a great list thank you! I never heard of i3wm I promise to read the docs.

Yes, microsoft windows. I use version 8.1 and while most end users loathe the interface I've studied the "windows" key and "context menu" key and found it quite fast to perform all my daily operations (except web browsing) mouse-free.

My experience with linux is that some programs are great but too many dont follow standard on very common keyboard operations such as search, tab navigation, context menu. Also it seems many of these desktop windows managers such as ratpoison come with default key mappings that conflict with many of my application's default key mappings which forces me to re-configure.

I invested some time customizing key mappings that would alleviate the issues, but I have a large stack of actual programming work I need to get to, and after awhile I just felt like I was trying too hard at it and decided to go back to the system that works for me. I would like to learn a little more about developer's mouse-free success with linux, vim, browsers and ides such as intellij. 2 years back when i researched this it didnt seem like a very important issue to many people, but to me the little bits of speed gained from keyboard shortcuts add up into great savings in time and cuts in repetitive movement and I consider it to be a crucial part of any development system.

hunt8• 12 years ago

There are plenty of others to pick from, too.

If you want to try out lots of different window managers, the LinuxBBQ distro Cream [0] has 76 different window managers installed.

[0] http://linuxbbq.org/cream.html

dllthomas7• 12 years ago

Having been stuck working with a couple Windows 8.1 servers, through remote desktop from a mouseless linux box, I can confirm that Windows has got surprisingly usable without a mouse. IMO, though, my ratpoison setup still beats it by miles (at least for my work flows).

rkowalick2• 12 years ago

I have used the awesome window manager (http://awesome.naquadah.org) for a long time. I think most of the big tiling window managers (DWM, xmonad) are similar.

The only things I ever use a mouse for on my linux computers is browsing the web.

jethro_tell2• 12 years ago

The only thing I use my mouse for is browsing the web.

I love vimium and vimperator. The only thing I use my mouse for is browsing pages with flash or embedded video. Some other browsing as well, but it's nice to be able to pop back and forth between term and browser, scroll the tutorial page down then pop back without a mouse.

sp3322• 12 years ago

I would like Windows' management better if it had more options than just full-screen and half-screen. Have you tried mapping the Windows key as ratpoison's escape key? e.g. http://ratpoison.wxcvbn.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/ChangeEscapeKeyH...

dllthomas7• 12 years ago

"I tried ratpoison in linux but found it to interfere with application keyboard shortcuts."

Huh? Rat poison is the only window manager I've used that interferes (meaningfully) with precisely zero application keyboard shortcuts. This is because it only intercepts one key, and having pressed that you there is a key bound in the next map to send the original key. And of course you can pick that top level key.

Edited to add: Though having said that, does anyone have any thoughts as to why my compose key doesn't work in ratpoison? I'd like to cut out the switch to unity when I want to study Polish...

dllthomas7• 12 years ago

s/$having pressed that$ you $there$/\1 \2/

djeikyb• 12 years ago

I use xmonad when I'm on linux. Now that I'm required to use windows, I use python-windows-tiler[0]. The one thing I sorely miss about xmonad is its multi-monitor support. You get nine workspaces. Each of these is monitor independent. It is trivial to put ws1 on m1 and ws2 on m2, then switch m2 to have ws7. The tiling window managers I've found for ms Windows simply don't have any concept of having workspaces independent of monitors. Every workspace always take up all of your monitors.

On linux I'll usually have a browser workspace, an ide workspace, an email/chat workspace, a console workspace, etc. And I'm able to rapidly put any combination of workspaces on my set of monitors.

[0] https://github.com/Tzbob/python-windows-tiler

zimbatm• 12 years ago

I like that the whole WM is implemented in two files, a .h for configuration and a .c. The code looks clean and has embedded ascii-art. This looks like a project made with love.

hunt8• 12 years ago

Thank you, this is my first proper C project so I have learnt a lot and have come a long way. I have really enjoyed working on it and would certainly describe it as a labour of love.

johnchristopher2• 12 years ago

Am I right you did it for the C language first ? It looks like it would have been easier to implement with Lua in awesome.

Nice job!

joaomsa• 12 years ago

Really dislike software with configuration baked into the code, every key binding and experiment requires recompilation which prevents managing it sanely through a package manager.

I get the appeal of "minimal" in this case, but it just doesn't work for me.

blux• 12 years ago

This is kind of a default approach for minimal WMs (probably inspired by DWM).

keenerd• 12 years ago

Do you consider an 85 megabyte configuration parser to be minimal?

Zikes• 12 years ago

Yep, definitely the sort of thing that belongs in a dotfile.

amackera• 12 years ago

Though that's very understandable I have to disagree. I've been using dwm and st for years now with nothing but love for both of them.

shapeshed• 12 years ago

I'm another advocate for dwm and st. Compiling dwm takes seconds (it is a small codebase) and keeps configuration out of the core.

icantthinkofone• 12 years ago

Compile time never trumps best practice.

hunt8• 12 years ago

I understand that it isn't a nice idea having code and configuration mixed together and that splitting them would be preferable. However, howm takes less than 1 second to compile on my laptop, once you have a configuration that you like you'll rarely change it and I feel that having the configuration in code makes it easier for hackers to find subtle new ways of customising howm.

A downside that I can see to using a header file for configuration is that a compile is required for installation and configuration. I don't see this as being too much of an issue as I don't plan on making howm available as a binary, so a compiler would be required anyway.

rakoo3• 12 years ago

I think we can all agree that once a good setup is found, you don't change it that much; recompiling is ok as long as it's fast.

The point of GP is that since config.h is part of the standard distribution, any local modification should be overwritten (or discarded) upon updating the software, or the user has to maintain a local "fork" with his custom config.h.

You should get inspiration from what suckless does [0]. It uses the same idea of config through header, and the "solution" is workable for all involved parties.

[0] http://dwm.suckless.org/customisation/

doki_pen• 12 years ago

The benefits of this model include less attack surface area and much leaner code resulting in less bugs. It doesn't fit every project, but the "configuration" code for this WM would likely be larger than the WM itself.

gpo• 12 years ago

This is obviously inspired by dwm, which is cool, but how is it different from dwm?

hunt8• 12 years ago

It's loosely inspired by dwm in that it uses a similar configuration file and keybinding system.

On a technical level, howm uses xcb- a more modern and efficient X protocol binding. dwm uses xlib.

From a user's perspective, howm has multiple modes for manipulating different kinds of windows as well as operators, motions and counts. This means that multiple windows can have the same operation performed upon them. For example (assuming that the correct modifier keys are being pressed) pressing "q4w" will lead to 4 windows being closed.

howm also has some features that dwm only provides as patches, such as useless gaps and a grid layout.

Rampoina4• 12 years ago

I really love vim keybindings and I use them wherever I can (firefox with vimperator, the shell etc), however I'm not sure that modes make sense on a window manager. In my opininon it doesn't have that many operations, and they don't differ that much from each other, I think that having to think which mode you're on and which one you need to use would only introduce friction and slow you down (in this case the normal mode is not that normal, i switch windows as often or more than I create new ones or switch layouts).

Another thing is that the operators, motions, and objects each need its modifier keys; in my opinion that just misses the point of having modes and one of the strong points of the vim keybindings. Because of that it was really hard for me to understand how to use Howm: the first time around I skipped the configuration part and went directly to the examples, and you don't mention anywhere there that q4c (for example) is really Alt_L+q, Alt_L+4, Alt_L+c. When I read the configuration part and the configuration file, to see each keybinding I got it, but still it took some googling to figure out that I needed to use xmodmap to know which keys are the MODXMASK.

EDIT: It seems you do mention that the operators, motions and objects need a modifier key, I missed it. Still, I think that it would be clearer if the keys to press were explicitly indicated (like Alt_L+q, Alt_L+4, Alt_L+c)

hunt8• 12 years ago

I have some more ideas for operations to add, this is the first release I have done and so it is lacking some features. I agree that some people might not find certain commands to be in the correct mode. You can change that from the configuration file though. I certainly take your point on board about moving being in normal mode and will have a think about whether or not this should be the default.

That's really great feedback about the documentation, I'll make it more obvious which modifiers keys need to be held down. Again, you can change the modifier key used for operators, counts and motions so that howm only uses one modifier key. This is how I had it for most of howm's development. I changed to using two modifier keys as I felt that it was nicer to have a logical separation between the commands and the operators, motions and counts. It also meant that some keys could be reused but with different modifiers.

Rampoina4• 12 years ago

I think they shouldn't use modifiers at all, ideally you would enter the mode with MODIFIER+modekey and then press the normal keys: q2c. I don't know if that's possible with your current program but that's what I meant.

cessor• 12 years ago

Harvey, your code looks very nice and expressive with appropriate comments. There is some space for improvements on this matter (well, there always is) but I found it very good to read and easy to follow!

Really well done, keep up the good work!

hunt8• 12 years ago

Thanks for the kind words! It'd be great if you could tell me what improvements you think would be best, I'm trying to make howm's code as nice as I can. I know that having everything in one file is frowned upon, but I quite like the simplicity of it.

Show HN: Howm – A Vim-like tiling X11 window manager

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