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GUI Software X Hardware

Window Managers For Small Screens? 94

Posted by timothy from the rat-poison dept.
saintlupus writes "I've got a question for the rest of the Slashdot community. I'm using an old clamshell iBook at work with Debian/PPC on it. As any Apple site can tell you, the iBooks of that era had a maximum resolution of 800x600. Now, I use a 19" monitor and a 17" monitor running together with Xinerama on my machine at home, and I'm used to that much space. I use WindowMaker on that computer, but on an 800x600 screen those Dock icons look the size of buses. Can anyone recommend a window manager that uses a minimum of screen real estate so that I can fit a bit more on the iBook's LCD?"
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Window Managers For Small Screens? More

Window Managers For Small Screens?

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  • Evil WM (Score:3, Informative)

    by truefluke ( 91957 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @01:54PM (#7619881) Homepage
    Not sure if you're requiring icons or don't mind being a console jockey, but give evil windowmanager [sourceforge.net] a try. Guaranteed the only thing on your screen will be the windows themselves.

    • Re:Evil WM (Score:4, Informative)

      by truefluke ( 91957 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @02:10PM (#7620056) Homepage
      Argh. I forgot that I wrote a review of this thing that goes into more detail than the brief splatter of words I posted above. Here's the URL: evilwm review [signalnine.com].

      I explain my reasons behind trying out this minimalist wm and how I found the experience. Quite positive actually.
    • Heh, I was just going to recommend it myself.
      I'm using it all the time I don't use icewm
      (which makes 99.95% now, but I still recommend
      icewm to newcomers).

      I've even put it into the MirBSD base system.

  • No problem (Score:3, Informative)

    by nepheles ( 642829 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @01:54PM (#7619883) Homepage
    Before to the KDE-Gnome era, any windowing manager would suit that spec. So it shouldn't be all that difficult to find something

  • Enlightenment (Score:2, Informative)

    by gooru ( 592512 )
    Try Enlightenment.

  • Fluxbox? or any other *Box? XFce? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Klowner ( 145731 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @01:56PM (#7619907) Homepage
    Give fluxbox [sourceforge.net] a shot, it uses almost no space at all except for a little slit. And the app menu appears by right clicking on the desktop.. Although iBooks only have one mouse button don't they.. WELL Then, NEVERMIND..

    Perhaps XFce [xfce.org] would suit you better. The panel can auto-hide and everything.

    Klowner

  • One of the *boxes (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @01:57PM (#7619916)
    openbox or blackbox are well suited when you have little physical screen space available.
    • I'll 2nd this recommendation.

      My Iopener has 800x600 and blackbox is the only way to go.

    • Re:One of the *boxes (Score:3, Informative)

      by n1ywb ( 555767 )
      Ditto that. I run BlackBox on my PowerMac 7500 w/800x600 screen. It's very real-estate efficient. It's also very fast, which makes it good for slow computers. The same could be said of other WMs, but few are as fast AND as pretty as BB et al. There are several BlackBox clones that also work well.
    • I'd definitely agree with Blackbox being a good choice. When I got my first Linux laptop in 1997, 'twas a NEC Versa 2000C, 486DX4-75, with a 640x480 screen. (Of course, that was a 640x480 TFT, not one of those lame "passive matrix" screens, and it had enough VRAM to run in 16-bit color!) Blackbox was my standard WM on it, and on everything else I used (other Linux boxen, SGI's and Suns) 'til I got OS X.

  • Ratpoison (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ratpoison [sourceforge.net]

    Alternatively you can get wmakerconf to remove the dock, workspace applet, etc. Also would recommend editing ~/GNUstep/Default/WMWindowAttributes to remove titlebars, resizebars, and window borders.

  • Ion (Score:5, Informative)

    by rawgod0122 ( 574065 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @02:01PM (#7619953)
    After spending literly 30 seconds reading the man page, and a day getting used to it, Ion was the best window manager I have ever used. It was designed to be very efficent, and worked great as a programming interface.

    http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/
    • I'll second this, although I recommend you to use ion-devel which is much more configurable than ion by itself. I also found out that setting LC_ALL to "fi_FI@euro" made the titlebars not show any text, and also be a lot smaller in ion. This could be nice if you wish to free up some space. Another locale might also work.
    • I third this. Best window manager ever, for me at least, on big screens and small.
    • I definitely agree here. Ion is by far my favorite window manager. I've used it well at 1024x768 and 800x600. It is very efficient, both in interaction with the user and how it uses your screen. Good luck.

    • usable link (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Come on, this is the web. Make a usable link [cs.tut.fi]. At any rate, it makes sure that /. doesn't reformat it.

  • Matchbox (Score:4, Informative)

    by Moghedien ( 237619 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @02:02PM (#7619964) Journal
    Matchbox [handhelds.org] is specifically designed for low resolutions.

  • yeah, shua (Score:3, Informative)

    by mike77 ( 519751 ) <mraley77&yahoo,com> on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @02:03PM (#7619973)
    try fvwm [fvwm.org]

    I don't care what anyone says, It's quick, small, and configurable

    • yeah fvwm is now by far my favorite WM. I used to be into *box's but the configurability of fvwm surpasses all of them.
  • Just choose a smaller size for the icons. Start the config app, choose Icon Preferences, and size. 24 pixels is ridiculously small. OTOH, XFCE [xfce.org] should possibly be nice on small screens. Autohide (or do without) the panel, and make the panel really thin (and autohide that too), and choose a thin and light theme like Microcurve (sorry, can't find a screenshot). It's nice when you're used to WindowMaker, since it's much of the same, only with lots of extra features.

  • Windowless window manager (Score:3, Interesting)

    by eyeball ( 17206 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @02:34PM (#7620294) Journal
    For a while I was obsessed with non-overlapping window managers, and ran a window manager called Ion for a while. It lets you split the screen into resizable panes, each with a tab. I actually ran this under Solaris with two monitors (not xinerama however). Screenshots here [mac.com] and here [mac.com].

    This may not be exactly what you want, but it's worth trying out especially on a limited sized screen.

    • Re:Windowless window manager (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Goo.cc ( 687626 ) * on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @02:45PM (#7620390)
      Well, how about no window manager?

      When I was using NetBSD, I wanted to run console only (I liked the command line and felt no need to turn a free, Unix-like OSes into Windows) but I didn't care for the limited number of lines and columns that NetBSD provided in its VGA console. My solution was to run X without a window manager, setting everything up via .xinitrc and using a healthly amount of -geometry switches. And if I needed it, twm was a command away.

      You can see an example of what I did here [goo.cc].
      • I've done this myself, in the past, with pleasant results. It was a bit of a fad at MIT several years ago, even going so far as to spawn nawm, `Not A Window Manager'. More recent versions of nawm are much more featureful, but still very spare and lightweight -- many people would use it with another windowmanager.

        xwit, the X Window Interface Tool, is a command-line program that provides access to many of the widnow manager features from the underlying protocol; it might be helpful in this case.

        Myself, I
      • That's a really cool wallpaper... where did you find it??

        ~foooo
    • fyi- GIFs are bad for screenshots. Use PNG or JPG. Your images look utterly horrendous. :P
      • FYI: JPEG are bad for screenshots. Use PNG or GIF. :-)

        It depends what the screenshot is, but most apps have lots of areas of flat colour, which makes them compress well with PNG & GIF. They also have lots of crisp edges (fonts, widget lines, etc.), which look really ugly with JPEG compression.

        What Goo.cc did wrong was using the wrong palette in the GIF and using dithering. Proper palette selection and no dithering would improve these screenshots immensely.
  • Fluxbox [sourceforge.net] is a featureful offshoot of Blackbox [sourceforge.net]. I use it on small screens as well as on large screens connected to slow computers. A nice simple design, with just enough information on the taskbar to make everything flow smoothly.

  • Eh? (Score:3, Informative)

    by psavo ( 162634 ) <psavo@iki.fi> on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @02:42PM (#7620354) Homepage

    FWIW, WindowMaker also supports 48x48, 32x32, 16x16 and 8x8 dock sizes. dockapps wont necessarily work with that, but windowmaker will.

    800x600 on 17" is totally insane.

  • KDE (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cbcbcb ( 567490 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @02:48PM (#7620409)
    KDE with the laptop window decorations and the panel set to the smallest height.
    • You can also configure the panel to hide unless you bring your mouse to the bottom of the screen.
  • any of the old tiny windowmanagers will do.

    listed in order of memory footprint above.
  • ratpoison takes up zero pixels, and all commands are issued from the keyboard.

  • I have the opposite problem (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ArmorFiend ( 151674 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2003 @03:26PM (#7620840) Homepage Journal
    I run at about 133 dpi, and find that most window managers (& their themes) have rediculously tiny and hard to configure titlebars etc. I kinda get by with windowmaker and more lately metacity (which has AA fonts in the titlebars), but I'm not happy with either.
  • the Fast Light window manager. It really is pretty fast and light. It also places the window decorations on the left side of the window rather than the top, taking advantage of the aspect ratio. It's nice.

    I'll also second the Ion recomendation. The gimp is painful in it, but if you're programming mostly like I am, it is an absolute godsend.
  • all of those have fairly amounts of window furniture, especially twm and olvwm (olwm). also they're all low on demands on the processors, so run quicker than gnome or kde etc.
  • Well, IMHO, the problem it's not related with a Window Manager, but with the config you are using. You can disable de dock and the clip and even the icons, so you can have all the screen just for you, even still using Window Maker.

    There are also some other window managers that you can try:
    - enlightenment: try the spiff theme
    - sawfish: spiff theme
    - icewm: there is a port of tigertcrack, I think it's called 'tgc' or 'IceCrack'. Very small borders and very keyboard friendly.
    - blackbox, openbox, fluxbox: all t
  • There's a fairly good list [plig.org] of available window managers over at plig.org [plig.org]. It may take some sifting to find what you're looking for, but then again, you'll have to sift through /. too...
  • Don't know about the others, but I am stick to ctwm. The default is very minimalistic, and the customization options are endless.
  • ...that you want smaller dockapps? I mean, most window managers can hide their docks or panels anyway, so i don't see what difference the wm makes.
  • I use fvwm2 (fvwm2-2.4.6-1.rpm). Unfortunately, RedHat no longer distributes fvwm, but the RPM leftover from the older release that I upgraded from works fine.

    I have configured a custom .fvwm2rc file to make it look and behave like the really old mwm window manager. I've got sizing borders around the windows, a title bar with menu/min/max buttons, context menus on the desktop and some frame controls, and nothing else.

    I explicitly turned off all of the "desktop" features and "docked" applets. They jus

  • I already chimed in on the Blackbox thread, as a longtime user of it, but I was thinking about it since I too have an iBook [apple.com]... Mac OS X's Aqua [apple.com] UI seems pretty minimal. The menu bar at the top of the screen obviously takes some space all the time, but it seems pretty proportional to what Blackbox would use - and because of how it works, that's one less menu bar that has to be in each application window. The dock can be set to totally auto-hide. And with Expose' [apple.com] in Panther... well, let's just say that's i
  • I have a Toshiba portege 3010 with a 10-inch 800x600 screen and use windowmaker without a problem. Icons are not that big. I also guess you could disable the dock; now that I think of it, I hardly ever use it.
  • You can reduce the Window Maker icon size from the default 64x64 all the way down to 24x24. (You have to restart Window Maker to see the changes.) It looks craptacular but it'll buy you a lot of screen real estate.

    I use Gnome on a 1024x768 iBook2. I selected a theme with minimal decorations, small window borders, etc. and I use the menu style top panel which is about the same size as the OSX Menu bar. It's not quite as spacious as the 1280x1024 Studio Display I use on the G4 at work but it's pretty neat.

    A
  • After trying Blackbox [sourceforge.net], I was hooked. Then, Fluxbox [sourceforge.net], a newer & better Blackbox, came along!

    Flux kicks ass on tiny laptop screens or dual UXGA flatpanels. :-)
  • It is fairly easy to make your environment work better for you without having to do anything more than just click a few options, and you don't really have to change a window manager or anything. start the windowmaker preferences utility and: 1. reduce the icon size to the smallest possible(if memory serves me right it's 24x24) 2. set some virtual desktops ( at least four) Virtual desktops are the greatest thing in window mangers nowadays. This way it's like having four different screenss or even more, plu
  • Icewm has a full screen mode with Alt-F11. I run a few windows (xterm, xemacs, xdvi, dillo) full screen and switch between them with Alt-Tab. But if you want to go back to a more conventional desktop just hit Alt-F11 again to restore the normal window size.
  • Great ideas for my PII-350/384M/4GB box, currently running Win2k (torrent/P2P/IRC idleman/MP3) running on an old ass packard hell 640x480x60hz radiation generator. VNC is available, but slow (i keep it at 32 bit color, why i don't know). I want to switch it to nix, probably slackware, and will need a WM.
    Boxes: 7
    M$: 2.5
    *nix: 4.5
    screen real estate: not enough.

    --
  • What about Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther)? The dock can be autohidden, and with " expose [apple.com]," the ability to run almost most standard GNU/UNIX apps (as a Debian user, you will be thrilled to know that the dpkg system--including apt-get--is available for Mac OS X through the Fink Project [sourceforge.net]), and increased performance over previous versions (even on your old G3), it might be just the thing you need. Unfortunately virtual desktops are not part of the standard Mac OS, although there are many free utilities to do this, whi

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