The world of Window Managers

Note from 2015: Nowadays I don't use any of these except bspwm and/or 2bwm sometimes, nowadays I use swm+wmutils or something really simple like that.

Let me start off by saying that I'm writing this at 23:00 in Switzerland's time, so please forgive any stupidities. Usually I go to sleep at 22:00 or something like that. Really need to go to sleep for tomorrow...

Anyway. I'm going to be talking about WMs (Window Managers) in GNU/Linux, those that can be found in Arch Linux.

TL;DR: I went with XMonad for reasons.

So the TL;SR (Too Long; Still Read) version will start by me saying that I tried almost, if not all of the WMs. I can confidently say I'm dissapoined there isn't a single stacking WM that is keyboard controlled, besides the mouse. That would be my ideal setup. But there isn't, so I tried a lot of dynamic WMs.

A short list of those I tried is the following:

• BSPWM
• XMonad, I went with this one
• Alopex
• awesome

Those are the most notable ones. The ones that I honestly tried for a while and can give a fair review or opinion for.

Alopex

Let's start with Alopex. Alopex is the one I like the most after XMonad. I've used it for at least... 2 or 3 months or something.

It is very nice, almost ideal, but it lacks the configurability I like.

awesome

Another one I really liked. I used this one for... 1 or 2 weeks, give or take a few.

I liked it but it's too heavy for me. Also I don't like Lua and the config seems to change every single update, which isn't good IMO.

BSPWM

This is the one I was most excited for TBH, but I couldn't get Dzen2 to work correctly with it so I had to give up. Super powerful window management though, I suggest you try this one before XMonad.

XMonad

Finally XMonad. The king of tiling WMs it seems. Atleast for me. What makes XMonad unique for me is that it's written in Haskell, the language I have my eye on, and that I'm currently trying to learn, to a degree, to see if I like it.

This is the one I went with because of reasons.