Some questions before I install Awesome WM

Question

Hi,
I'm new to Arch and relatively new to Linux in general but I do enjoy tinkering with it.
Recently I have tried many different window managers, Gnome, KDE, Openbox and Fluxbox, each of which have their own little perks. However whilst browsing through the monthly screen shot threads I stumbled upon something new, something I haven't heard of; tiling window managers. I find the idea behind them to be innovative and would like to give them a try, particularly Awesome WM, before I do so I have a few questions outlined below.
1). I understand that a mouse is not needed, which can be a good thing but an obstacle as well depending on what I want to do. What I would like to ask is that can you keep the mouse functionality as well such as the cursor, left click, right click and possibly the scroll wheel? (Is this possible in both Xmonad and Awesome WM)
2). Can you have a panel so that you can either easily launch your applications or when you minimize say pidgin you can see its status icon?
3). Most of the screen shots I have seen show all these terminal windows running, I assume thats just for show. You can run gui based aps too such as something for burning cds, openoffice, firefox and other gtk aps?
4). If neither apply to Awesome WM, could you point me in the direction of a tiling window manager more tailored for my needs.
Please only leave helpful comments, I don't want to hear comments such as why do you want to use Awesome WM if your planning on running gui aps or don't want to run their terminal alternatives....Linux is about choice and I am entitled to my own as are you.
If you can help that would be "awesome".
PS: Please excuse the rather verbose post; its a problem of mine, hopefully one you come to find endearing.
Last edited by blackbird (2008-03-11 11:50:19)

Answer 1

blackbird wrote:
chimeric wrote:
blackbird wrote:Your response leads me to believe that I was asking if Awesome WM lets you assign shortcuts to the mouse, such as your very own example where a combination of mod4 and middle click would launch the terminal. What I intended to ask was whether you could use the mouse like you use it in other environments such as Gnome...where moving the mouse would move a cursor on your screen, left click would be used to select a window, move it around...etc.
Well I said "Yes." . The mouse behaves exactly like in other WMs and additionally you can add other functionality if you like. "Moving windows" is a little different in tiling window managers because windows aren't supposed to be moved around with the mouse, because the WM arranges them for you. However, in most tiling WMs, windows can have a special state named "floating", which means the WM isn't responsible how the window is placed on the screen and you can move it around freely (with the mouse). This is for example useful for applications like mplayer, vlc, gimp or gajim.
Brilliant; thanks for the clarification, I just hope nothing extra is required to obtain this functionality. Well if anything else is required that wont be a problem considering how good the Linux community is.
Thanks again
PS: There is a slight drawback to using Awesome WM though; whenever you google something about awesome wm you get results about people stating how awesome their window managers are, not specifically awesome wm lol. Everything comes at a price.
Nothing extra is required....just already preconfigured keystrokes do the job.
Last edited by ph0tios (2008-03-11 16:20:22)