MaxieZ's Page

So it all started out simply enough. I was sick of all the window managers out there. I didn't want anything with a bunch of graphics or menus. I never click icons. So I wanted something with a lot of control, but not a lot of crap.

You'll hear the same story just about anywhere and this one isn't any different. As I don't want to bore you, I'll cut out the countless hours of work I put in to looking at different window managers and get right to where the real work happened.

I tried evilwm, but it simply didn't have enough features for me.

I tried papuawm, but it lacked stability.

So I set out to take the best of both and I wrote my own. Well I copied parts of both and added my own where I wanted it.

This suited me fine for a while, but I'm very lazy. I didn't want to keep working and maintaining this. So I figured I would just try a different approach. I have set out to just patch evilwm. This is a lot easier for me to maintain and as I modeled everything off of evilwm, it looks the same.

So the patch I use is here. You can find a copy of evilwm here

tar xzvf evilwm.tar.gz
cd evilwm
zcat ../patch_file | patch -p1
make allinone
mv evilwm /usr/bin

Just like evilwm, you use ctrl+alt+key to do anything. Here are some basic commands:

Enter: start a terminal

o: Call xlock

r: Toggle Maximise

t: Toggle Maximise Vertically

g: Toggle Maximise Horizontally

x: Close

-: Minimise (puts it in a stack of hidden windows)

+: Restore (Pops the last window off the stack)

i: Show window title and position

y: Place window in the top left

u: Place window in the top right

b: Place window in the bottom left

n: Place window in the bottom right

c: Place window in the the center of the screen

l: Move window to the right

h: Move window to the left

j: Move window down

k: Move window up

w: Shrink window vertically

s: Enlarge window vertically

a: Shrink window horizontally

d: Enlarge window horizontally

down: Lower window

up: Raise window

left: Previous Virtual Desktop

right: Next Virtual Desktop

,: Move window to the previous Virtual Desktop

.: Move window to the next Virtual Desktop

1: Move to the first Virtual Desktop

2: Move to the second Virtual Desktop

3: Move to the third Virtual Desktop

4: Move to the fourth Virtual Desktop

5: Move to the fifth Virtual Desktop

6: Move to the sixth Virtual Desktop

7: Move to the seventh Virtual Desktop

8: Move to the eighth Virtual Desktop

Backspace: Kill X (this is just X's normal death

Alt + Mouse Button 1: Move window

Alt + Mouse Button 2: Resize window

Alt + Mouse Button 3: Lower window

That's about it. Yes it took all of that to make me happy in Xwindows

Much thanks go to Ciaran Anscomb who wrote evilwm in the first place. Almost all of my window manager was just stuff I ripped off of his anyways. Including his very simplistic natural design. I spoke to Ciaran about these changes, but never heard back from him. I assume he probably thought my changes were too much fluff :)

Anyways. If you want to use it go ahead. If not, find what makes you happiest.

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