I like window managers. I like light weight and effecient window managers. catwm is very light, very efficent and very easy to use. Using it has made me think more about how I can do more by doing less
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I chose catwm after reading the thread in the arch forum. I realised that a chunk of the code was actually GPL'd quite early on (20100630 was the earliest reference I came across) after moetunes and milomouse hacked on it. moetunes then went on the make dminiwm (basically a very close catwm fork) and snapwm a much more feature rich version.Though he reverted to a lax license.
There were a lot of derivatives built from catwm. monsterwm frankenwm etc that have since lost momentum. Mostly as ricers seem to have moved to sucklesses dwm. dwm and dmenu are not my thing though I did like how wmii functioned ootb.
The moetunes gpl'd fork was kept alive here:
viyoriya's fork is the version I compiled from. There are only 2 issues I'd call bugs I've come across in catwm. 1:the odd ghost window which I noticed moetunes fixed in dminiwm. 2:A bit of a chore getting the window size correct with dual screens. To be honest I wouldn't recomend it if you want to run dual screens. It's just not what it's built for. NotionWM is great for that and that's what I switch to if I need the output to another screen or projector.
There was a bug noted somewhere about disabling cycling anti-clockwise but I found a fix in the arch thread and it's been fine cycling both cycling both clockwise and anti-clockwise for me.
Niggles: Not having dbus means that normal notifiers that expect it won't work. A workspace number notifier would be nice. I know the solution is possible with mkfifo but I failed to make it work with herbe. I tend to know whats where and if I do open something on an occupied workspace I just tab it through until it maximizes, in short I gave up and learnt a better system until I didn't need it. That system I call "The bedroom" as opposed to the "Desktop". In short I put things where they're meant to go just like in the bedroom. Socks in the sock draw, coats in the wardrobe, baffies (slippers) under the bed or on my feet etc. I don't have draws or wardrobes on my PCs but I do have workspaces
After 18 months of catwm being my main window manager i can up-date on what "That system is" I have all GUI (Graphical User Interface) applications from workspace 1 up and terminal application from workspace 0 down. The only hard and fast rule I have is file managers on workspace 1 and browsers on workspace 2. the rest get filled as I use them. intermediat windows are opened where ever I am and either closed after using them or sent down the stack or sent to the appropreate workspace
Gone on the desktop is fittstool and herbe. I do keep it on the laptop but really it's only for a bit of bling.
fittstool only works at the top of the screen in the panel area as the open windows covers the activation area. It's a minor inconvenence as I just put my top 15 or so most commonly required action at the top and if I'm going to launch something it usually goes on an empty workspace where it's not an issue anyway. iirc dminiwm fixes this. Interesingly enough xdotool works fine as a fittstool replacement in this regard but it expects some things that don't exist in catwm.
catwm is not and does not try to be fully EWMH or freedesktop complient.
herbe intigration can be buggy. I don't require it but it's usefull while learning new setting and I have to admit the "bling" is fun. I've been using fittstool for years and it's very solid and I know what's in the hotspots. I'm not a fast typer and it's as quick for me to mouse-down in the top right corner to launch pinix to access my system info than try and recal a keybind.
mc (and hence mcedit), xterm, pinit, htop, wavmon, weather (wttr), ncdu, xtrlock, zzz, can all setup in fittstool should it be desired and it's very light
In short I have a good .bashrc with well configured aliases and see no need for a panel.
My main keybinds are:
There are more but I never/rarely use them. I did configure alt+letter (a to z) as application launchers but found I didn't use it so disabled it.
I'm no geek so no coder but I love window managers and hate bloat and I've tried around 40. I have a very nice twm setup but it's needs set up for each and every machine to display correctly also it can be a bit prone to an odd freeze. I very much doubt many are smaller and as usable as window managers as catwm ootb.
At the end of the day I'm a copy-left freetard. I accept that I have to use open-source but prefer free-software so start from that position, copy-left > lax > permissive. I try and stay in the copy-left & lax zones. It's my main worry about Hyperbola moving to Hyperbola-BSD.