Re: Poll: best hackable window manager or DE for Emacs-loving freedom activists

[<tomas@tuxteam.de>]

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On Thu, Nov 04, 2021 at 08:58:06PM -0300, Jorge P. de Morais Neto wrote:
> Hi.  I love digital ethics, GNU and Emacs!  Which keyboard-driven
> hackable window manager (WM) or desktop environment (DE) do you
> recommend?  I currently use GNOME 3 DE.  Years ago I used Enlightenment,
> Xfce and Fluxbox but then I migrated to GNOME to learn a good libre and
> user friendly DE so I could assist unskilled users such as my family.

[...]

I did the whole tour (it has been a long ride), starting with TWM (gah!)
and Olwm, GWM, some Fvwm incarnations, Gnome (up to 2-ish).

When I was seeing the direction Gnome was taking, I wandered away, homeless
tried blackbox, awesome (Lua scriptability was attractive, docs were so-so,
tiling not my cup of tea), you name it.

Since about ten years (take or give) it's Fvwm. I don't think I'm changing
again.

It does what it says on the tin. It's scriptable. It doesn't overreach.
It works very well with "point to focus" (most of the above say they do,
but it's very clear their developers don't quite use it).

And... the most important to me: it treats their users as grown-up people,
which I appreciate.

It takes a bit of effort to wrap one's head around its config language,
but then It Just Works. It has man pages!

It's *not* a desktop environment, which I appreciate, too.

Most of the key mapping stuff (Compose, language layers) I leave to X;
I reserve one modifier for the WM (the "Windows" key, duh) for the WM to
start important apps (Emacs, Xterm, what not) and move across workspaces
and pages.

But I'm weird.

Cheers
 - t

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