DWM - useless gaps are useless!
Many people in Linux community spend too much time “ricing” their desktops. Here are few points I came to after using minimal window managers for 2 years:
- Screen real estate matters
- Gaps are useless (unless you care about your wallpaper)
- Wallpapers draw too much of your attention
- You don’t need to constantly see your CPU temperature, battery percentage etc.
- Less windows is better
And from that I can derive an advice on how to stay functional, productive and efficient with minimal window managers:
- Get rid of gaps
- Stop caring about your wallpaper
- Don’t put many windows on your screen at once. You probably only need one. Two is ok, sometimes three. More windows = less focus
- Try removing window borders (or using
1px blackborder). You won’t be able to see which window is focused this way, and that will naturally encourage you to keep less windows on the screen - Decrease the number of available workspaces / tags
- Hide your status bar when you don’t need it
Following these steps leads you to super-productive no-distraction fullscreen experience. You still get all the advantages of your window manager though.
Try it! (you can always switch back)
Evolution of my desktop
Here’s my journey to my current WM philosophy - represented in random screenshots with a couple of comments.
If you want to replicate a setup on the screenshot - lookup it’s date and checkout the corresponding commit of my dwm build.
i3
I’ve been happy user of i3 with a lot of “ricing” for a long time. I liked transparent windows, blur and shadows:
DWM
But then I decided to switch to suckless dwm. The functional approach was so much better then manual window management in i3 - as a perfectionist I always spent extra time arranging windows “in a cool way”. DWM solved this problem entirely, but I still couldn’t live without beautiful wallpaper and gaps.
Fuck gaps!
After ~4 months of dwm (and ~year of using minimal window managers) I realized - gaps are just taking too much of my screen real estate! Let’s try removing them entirely:
As a bonus you stop caring about your nice wallpaper because you only see it once - when you first boot your machine. You can also get rid of your composite manager now. Finally, get rid of that bright orange:
That setup was untouched for 4 months! Finally rollback some patches to get that beautiful default status bar (that color though!):
Current state
That lived for 3 more months and now I use gray as the accent color and all my borders are black! Also I decreased the number of available tags.
Most of the time I hide status-bar anyway.
