moonwm VS i3

I am using my own WM MoonWM, which is based on dwm. It is probably not for everyone, but I think that goes for every WM (also it is probably not as stable as the "big" players). A common first WM is probably i3, but you really just have to try some until you find one that fits.

The main difference compared to other window managers is that in dwm when you switch tags the windows that are not shown are simply moved to a negative x position, whereas in most other window managers the windows become iconified which involves a few more steps like mapping and unmapping the window. I don't think this should make a difference, but there is a build of dwm that iconifies windows when they are hidden rather than moving them to a negative position if you'd like to try that out.

You can install instantWM on another distro. I myself wrote MoonWM, which is based on dwm and should support basic DE functionality as well as draging windows with you mouse. If you want to you can give it a try. Although I should also not that it is not as smooth of an experience, as many regular DEs and I don't plan an pushing any updates other than obvious bugfixes in the near future.

I have this implemented in this commit.

Have a look into dmenu, rofi and xmenu. They are all good at different things. The first two are keyboard driven and support a basic application menu by default. Xmenu is more like a context menu. For the most part you create the menus yourself with scripts. You can pipe stuff into their stdin and get the selected entry via stdout. Here is an example of what I use for my dwm build.

ControlMask should definitely work though and does so on my build.

Idk, but this is the ginormous list of patches I have applied on my build:

While I believe Memory Saver was a great improvement, it only works if the tab is hidden or the window minimized. I recently learned the required state is not triggered if the tab is open but on another virtual desktop. At least this is the case with many of not all Linux window managers. Some of the many discussion threads on the topic:

https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/4353

> This is very true, and unfortunately there are very few people working on linux accessibility (including not me! I am part of the problem!).

Accessibility work itself ironically suffers from an accessibility problem. I brought up i3wm above, the issue for that is pretty illuminating: https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/3393

It's not that the devs are saying "this doesn't matter", the devs behind one of the most popular tiling window managers in the X11 ecosystem are saying, "this does matter, but we don't know how to fix it. We don't know what changes we'd need to make to get Orca working."

It's a really fundamental breakdown that's kind of a tragedy because I honestly believe that if accessibility communities were more heavily baked into testing and development in Linux and if this wasn't treated like two separate worlds, it would be better for everyone -- fixing accessibility concerns very often improves interfaces across the board and makes them more powerful.

But... how do you bridge that gap? I don't really know, I tried looking into Orca to see what would need to happen here and bounced off of it pretty hard, it's not a very approachable tech stack and there aren't tutorials or getting started guides. And on the other side of the issue I can preach about needing accessibility input during interface design, but I'm not in a position to give specific advice because I don't use screenreaders or alternate control schemes and I don't know what the biggest problems are.

The people who need to be involved in that process can't get involved because there's a tech barrier in place even for technically inclined people, and because the underlying software locks them out from the start. i3wm isn't ever going to get someone who's intimately familiar with Orca to jump into the conversation because the people who need to use Orca can't use i3wm. So that leaves the people who can address that tech barrier, but they don't know what to do or how to approach the problem because of the lack of involvement and because the communities are isolated from each other. So it's a chicken-and-egg problem and I don't know how to solve it.

This is partially why i use tools like i3 (/ sway). i like the tool; it works extremely well for me; the design has stayed the same for 20 years; there's no profit motive to come along and fuck everything up. it just works. it is boring in the best way possible.

I use MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid-2014) with Manjaro as OS using i3 as a window manager. It isn't perfect, but I'm thrilled with it. I have been a Mac OS user for the last 15 years and wouldn't change what I have now for a Mac OS because I don't need more than what I'm using for development.

Even though, we have moved the official i3 support channel to GitHub discussions, i3's biggest community is still on reddit and if things continue like that there is going to be a lot of helpful content on an increasingly closed platform.

for example, take i3. https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/4478

For daily usage I really like kubuntu with i3wm, but it takes some configuration and getting used to the shortcuts, but it's well worth it