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http://systemd-free.org provide painless instructions for the switch on Arch.

Have you tried i3wm? It's my wm of choice, it's tiling and it uses dmenu by default. How does it stack up against spectrwm/xmonad?



No, I haven't, at least recently. I switched to tiling about 7 years ago, tried a range of WMs (dwm, ratpoison), stuck with awesomewm for several months, but as it was changing to Lua-based configuration with too much of a flux, I left it for xmonad. Two things that immediately struck a chord with me were multi-monitor support and sane keyboard shortcuts. This post¹ may add something for you.

I learned of spectrwm only recently, it clones xmonad's UI, but is more practical (written in C, ini-style configuration vs Haskell code, doesn't need GHC installed). Painless switch for an xmonad user.

¹ https://www.acehack.org/posts/2015-09-19-i3.html


i3 already does multimonitor pretty well, iirc, and I don't have multiple monitors yet. Also, I really like i3's keyboard shortcuts. So I'll stick to i3 for now.

Honestly, I think i3 is probably closer to dwm than any of the others you mentioned, and I kind of like it for that. dwm goes a but too far with its configuratiob system, but i3 hits the sweet spot. I want my WM to work, and get out of my way: I have enough things to tinker with.

Although, if I'm ever convinced to go back from tiled managers, I may try sawfish. I do love lisp...




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