The Tiling Truth

Form, function and flexibility. I find that these three concepts are not always easy to rank. Sometimes I feel that form trumps functionality, sometimes I don’t. When it comes to window managers however, function is king!

The Form Junkie

I have to admit, I’ve been totally ignorant about tiling window managers up until now. I’ve always wanted my desktop to look nice and I’ve sometimes gone to great lengths to customize my desktop to be pixel perfect the way I want it. But lately I’ve come to a realization; mouse pointers suck!

Well most mouse pointers do anyway. I’m a trackball user so I think all regular mice sucks anyway, but now I’ve started hating trackpads. I’ve been planning on picking up a new laptop soon (well as soon as the X230 gets released) but I want to be able to use it on the couch without having to rely on a mouse/trackpad/trackball. The Lenovos “nipple-mouse” is about as far as I want to go since it sits smack in the middle of the keyboard.

I need a keyboard centric desktop environment.

Enter xmonad

Tiling window managers to the rescue! More specifically; xmonad to the rescue!

xmonad is an awesome (no pun intended*) tiling window manager written in haskell. It’s fast, easy to use, easy to configure and it runs entirely of the keyboard. There are many great guides to configuring xmonad, and it’s incredibly stable (well duh, it’s written in haskell).

* Not really a “pun”, but “awesome” is the name of another tiling window manager.