all that glitters..??

"Never buy low serial numbers." Easy advice to give, but hard to follow. Witness the modern-day genius of pre-marketing: every time a neat new hi-tech gadget gets announced, a virtual army of unsuspecting consumers turns out to pay for the privilege of becoming beta-testers. Egging them on are "reviewers" (possibly hired shills), who write glowing reviews of the as-yet unmanufactured product in question. Occasionally, we are treated to videos of consumers camping out overnight in front of an electronics store for the privilege of being first in line to purchase a shiny new experimental gizmo that the manufacturer needs to get rid of before a greatly-improved version 2.0 is launched a few months later... http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20111205#feature

I could haven't have written it any better than Robert Storey, as above.

i found an old .iso in my archives. wondering why i had it in the first place, i started exploring it... i am most impressed by WattOS R4. i couldn't believe how fast it boots, how efficient it's footprint is, and still functional. i have it installed now and think i am going to keep it.

i am using wattos4 as a browser appliance - extremely nimble and fast. who would have believed it from an ubuntu base! so, i plonked for it's latest iteration WattOS R6, and found it to be slightly worse than wattosr4.

i have reviewed antix before, but i can't recollect. i will have a look and update this post here.

evilwm

my wm journey moves on... from various bloatwares to fluxbox to ratpoison to spectrwm to dwm... now to evilwm :-)
i hope to keep this post updated, and accumulate my evilwm experience.

i did a memory profile on some window managers on my radar, and found evilwm to be using the least memory of them. that made me look at it in more detail, and i find i like it better than dwm that i'm currently using.

evilwm install in debian
[code]# apt-get update && apt-get install evilwm[/code]

edit .xinitrc (.xsession if you use any dm). change current wm with evilwm.
[code]exec evilwm -term gmrun -nosoliddrag[/code]

keyboard meta is ctrl-alt
my most used are

1-8 - change virtual desktop
left - prev virtual desktop
right - next virtual desktop
f - (un)fix window

x - maximise current window (toggle)
= - maximise current window vertically (toggle)
HJKL - shift window
hjkl - move window
yubn - move window to screen corner

alt+tab - cycle through windows (don't use meta key)

to maximise window horizontally: use = and x alternatively and repeat to toggle.
to move windows between virtual desktops: fix window, change desktop, unfix window.

manual says "To make evilwm exit, you have to kill the process". i completely agree - providing spurious buttons is bloat - not the job of a wm. and why would you want to exit x? to shutdown?

just shutdown
$ sudo halt

if i do have to quit evilwm
$ killall -9 evilwm

as i have mapped gmrun to evilwm default term, i bring up a command-line with ctrl-alt-enter and enter the above commands.

or you could map the commands to a keyboard shortcut of your choice. if that is how you like it, use xbindkeys.

as this is an extremely efficient wm, for any additional functionality you can use other extremely efficient apps to add features you may need.

gmrun - command-line application launcher
xbindkeys - custom keyboard shortcuts

ref links:
http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/ChangeLog-1.1
wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/evilwm
gentoo-wiki.info/evilwm
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=15077

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