My Tier List For Tiling Window Managers

one of the things that my channel is most known for probably is telling window managers and as such i get a lot of questions about telling window managers from viewers of the channel and recently i got a request from a viewer he wanted me to create a tier list of all the tiling window managers that i've tried and i thought that's an interesting video so why not so today i'm going to do a tier list of 11 tiling window managers that i have used and i feel comfortable enough i feel like i know them well enough that i can give a pretty good ranking of these or a tier listing of these in my opinion of course a tier list is going to be an opinion piece right it's not going to be factual in any way right it's not definitive you know the tiling window managers that i love you may hate and the ones that i hate you may absolutely love so again it's an opinion piece so let me get started and of course to get started with making a tier list most people are going to use a tier listing program something like tierlist.com or there's proprietary software out there that most content creators use to make their tier lists unfortunately those programs aren't available on linux and even if they were they're proprietary i wouldn't use them so i'm going to use a free and open source program to create my tier list and of course the program i'm talking about is going to be so what i did is i just quickly spun up this little image here so i created this tier list here and i'm gonna have five levels let me zoom in 100 and you can see my levels are going to be great good okay meh and yuck so which 11 tiling window managers will we be ranking let me get into the text tool here in yemp and i am going to be ranking the following make sure you can see all of this and get the line spacing all wrong here but i'm going to be ranking awesome bs pwm dwm exwm i3 window manager left wm qtile spectre wmr spectrum stump wm and xmo net now let me go ahead and merge that layer down so there's not that weird line behind it so let me go ahead and make the window full screen here so we can see everything because there was a little bit of a cut off here at the bottom let's start with the awesome window manager so let me go ahead and jump i'm going to create a new layer because awesome is going to go into the great tier so i'm going to make this layer name great and let's go ahead and add awesome now the reason the awesome window manager is in the great tier is because it's very easy to use it's very new user friendly in that when you install awesome window manager it comes with a panel it already has like a floating mode enabled by default actually has title bars and window decorations it looks like a floating window manager when you first launch into it until you configure it kind of to be a tiling window manager which is really what it's designed for so even people that have never used italian window manager can use awesome it's very easy to configure it's written and configured in lua which is kind of nice it's a dwm fork so actually i think the code base is actually written in c but the configuration file is written in lua and you use a lot of lua libraries to extend it and because of this awesome is extremely customizable probably the most customizable window manager bar none and because of that awesome has to be in the great tier moving on to the next window manager is bspwm let me create a new layer because it's not going to go in the great tier but i am going to put bspwm in a good tier so now the reason i put bspwm in the good tier instead of the great tier is because it's a manual tiler and you know i prefer dynamic tilers like awesome rather than manual telling window managers like bspwm that's just a personal preference that's again it's an opinion piece the other thing is i'm not crazy about the way bspwm is configured it's okay but the way bs pwm is configured is you write a config file and typically people write this config file using bash scripting but literally you could use any language you wanted to to create this config file because all this config file does is call upon command line bsp programs like bspc and things like that that control the the windows move windows move workspaces things like that so literally you could actually write your bspwm config in bash or python i mean you could write it in heck you could probably write it in haskell if you wanted to i mean it'd be crazy but you could do it and while that's neat i also find that a little weird and i think a lot of new tiling window manager users might find that a little weird and i mentioned that i'm not a fan of manual tiling window managers that's why i didn't put it in the great tier but as far as manual tiling window managers go i think bs pwm is definitely the best one i think some of the default layouts make sense i think you know documentation for bspwm is pretty good the one thing i will say is like if you go to their github and they explain how uh manual tiling works you know they they start with like a tree diagram and it's confusing as hell like people that really didn't know anything about tiling window managers bs pwm reading their documentation might be a little confusing that's why i probably wouldn't recommend bs pwm to somebody that just started with tiling window managers moving on to the next tiling window manager on the list is dwm and dwm i don't think i have to create a new layer here in for yet because i think i'm going to put it in the good tier right alongside bspwm let me make this a little bigger here so why is dwm in the good tier well the good points is that it is a dynamic tiler which for me i like i like the master stack layout which is the default layout for dwm it's also the default layout for awesome being a clone of dwm actually it's a fork of dwm awesome is now one of the things about dwm is its suckless software meaning that it has a strict lines of code limit that they arbitrarily impose on at 2 000 lines of code so out of the box it is kind of sparse on features like you're going to want to patch this thing and having to patch software meaning you go grab patches from sucklus.org and use the patch command and hope it works you know the automatic patching if it doesn't then you have to manually patch it where you read the diff files and go place lines of code and specific files and the dwm source code and then recompile not new user friendly at all right it's even not it's not new user friendly but even for people that know what they're doing people like me i find that tedious right i don't want to do that so even though i think dwm as far as just the function and feel of it is fantastic it easily could be in the great tier if not for the fact that you have to patch it because of that i have to dock it down into the good tier next on our list is exwm exwm is a emax tiling window manager so it's an emacs program that you install and then it basically turns emags into a tiling window manager meaning in your login manager you log into emacs essentially right people always talk about just booting directly into emacs that emacs is an operating system well emacs can't really be an operating system but it absolutely can be a window manager many people do use it as a window manager and i've experimented with it and it had some good points and some bad points but honestly i've got to put it down here in the yuck category so i let let me create a new layer so i'm going to create this layer call it yuck even though i said you know it had some good points and some bad points the bad points are pretty bad honestly so let's start with the good points the good points is you know when you turn emacs into your window manager if you know how emacs works then you know how your window manager works because all you're doing with exwm is just you're living inside a emacs window and if you know how buffers and frames work in emacs that's all you're doing to control windows you're just navigating around buffers and frames inside emacs so your emacs user that's great you know it's not a big learning curve honestly it's not if you're an emacs user now if you're not an emacs user obviously you you shouldn't even try this the other thing with exwm is that emacs and this this is a fault of emacs in general not just exwm emacs is still single threaded it's not multi-threaded so do you really want your tiling window manager to be single threaded no it's it's very limiting i have found exwm to be very slow it would typically hang on me when i was doing big jobs you know i do a lot of content creation obviously with you know doing things in and caden live rendering videos and things like that that are very resource intensive and i found exwm just really bad for that crashes all the time things like things that i found completely unacceptable i would never use it on my main production machine i think it's a neat project but as long as emacs has that limitation where it's single threaded exwm has to be in the yuck tier moving on is herbst luftwm let me create a new layer for herb's lift because it is going to go in the meth category burps luft is another manual tyler again i prefer dynamic tilers and herbs luft like bs pwm can be configured in any language you want typically people use bash scripting to configure it but i mean you could write your herbs love config using anything i i just find herbs lift not as comfy as bs pwm bs pwm is a little easier to get into if i'm being honest like if i was a new user and wanted to to try a manual teller first i said vspwm isn't i wouldn't it wouldn't be my first tiling window manager but it could be my second or third right herbs looft i would say that's a little more difficult just a tad there's some some slight differences with herbs loaf and bspm as far as herbs lift comes with a panel although i think i used a poly bar with herb's look bspwm doesn't come with a panel at all most people that use bsp wm use polybar with bs pwm i have actually experimented a little bit using x-mobar with erbs lift and that worked okay as well one thing i'll say about herb sluff they do have a website they do have some documentation i wouldn't say the documentation for herbslift is great i wouldn't say it's it's deep it certainly doesn't compare with the documentation on some other window managers we're going to discuss one of them we've already discussed awesome has great documentation there's a couple we haven't talked about yet that have just fantastic documentation and one of those that has fantastic documentation is i3 and i3 is another manual tyler like bsbwm and herbs luft and honestly i don't think it's as good as bs pwm there's some things about i3 that irk me a little bit so you know what i'm gonna put it also in the meh category now i3wm let's talk about the good the good is they have a fantastic website with fantastic documentation that is always a plus but i mean you really are supposed to have fantastic documentation right if if the best thing i can say about a piece of software is hey it has really good documentation well yeah i mean that's that's a given like if you didn't have good documentation uh like we shouldn't reward people for for doing the things that they were supposed to do anyway right now let's talk about the negatives with i3 window manager one of the things i don't like about this window manager is the default config i know you can change it but especially with new users the fact that i3 window manager unlike every other tiling window manager known to man there's dozens of these things and like hundreds of programs on our linux systems instead of using hjkl the vim motion keys they move over one key and use jkl semicolon and it makes this thing practically unusable for anybody used to the motion keys i can't use it you guys have seen me try to use the default config and i immediately have to change it every time i do a base install of i3 i don't know why the devs are so committed to keeping those horrible key bindings but that that's a big deal one thing about the config for i3 is it is written in a uh invented syntax just for i3 it's written in a new user friendly syntax it's not written in any programming or scripting language like most of the rest of this stuff is so like awesome you know you're configuring with lua and dwm everything is in c bs pwm could be in any language but typically it's bash scripting right i3wm has its own config file written in its own custom syntax proprietary syntax and that's okay it's very new user friendly but because it's not a proper programming language it is limiting in what you can do in that config right where if you know some lua for example you can configure awesome to do whatever you want or if you knew some c you could do whatever you want with dwm you can't really use that i3 config file to do that much now i3 does have plenty of plugins and extensions there's plenty of documentation you can actually do a lot with i3 i will say as far as being new user friendly it is along with awesome probably the the best for new users out of the bunch we've talked about so far next up is left wm let me create a new layer here because left wm is going to go in the okay layer so left wm and the reason left wm is going to go in the okay layer is because to me it's just an okay window manager i don't love it i don't really hate it either i could use it i actually think it's a fine tiling window manager is essentially a clone of another window manager we're going to talk about later x moned leftwm is written in rust but it's not configured in rust like i3 it has a simple uh syntax that it uses for its config file a custom syntax so you that again that limits the customization you can make with that config file so you know you don't have ultimate power the way you have like with dwm because you it's written in c you have to go into the c source code and do everything which means you can do anything you want to with whatever knowledge you have if the c programming language but you can't really do that with left wm now one of the things i like about left wm is it has the ability to have custom themes meaning you set several different themes and you can swap between them and and you can swap between using uh different panels different panel themes and things like that because it has these scripts that come with it i i didn't play around with left wm that much when i tried it uh this was the last time i tried it was probably well over a year ago i spent a couple of weeks with it and i thought it was neat and i got it working with polybar rather easy because it doesn't come with its own panel you choose a panel polybar works nicely with it for those of you that are already using polybar because it's an exmonet clone x mode bar also works really nicely with it i used xmobile with left ibm for a while too and that was fine leftwm is one of the younger window managers on the list today too it hasn't been around that long and i'm sure it's going to improve drastically from where it's at but already it's a pretty good tiling window manager if it was the only tiling window manager on the planet and i had to use it i'd be okay with it which is why it's in the okay tier next up is q tile and anybody that has watched this channel for any length of time probably knows where qtal is going to go on this list utah obviously let me get to this layer here the great layer because i'm going to add something to the great layer i'm going to add q-tel q-tel is an x-monad clone again except instead of being written in rust like leftwm q-tile is a exmonad clone written in python and the config file is also written in python because it's configured and written both in python meaning you can do whatever the hell you want to with whatever knowledge you have of python in that config file and you can make qtile do practically anything so that makes it very powerful because it's written in python which is a language you know most people start out with if you're learning programming most people can figure out a little bit of python i would say q-tile also is one of the more new user-friendly tiling window managers to use q-tile also comes with a panel out of the box much like awesome with so again that makes it new user friendly now i've done videos on all of these window managers i'm going to talk about today but especially qtile is one i have done many videos i've got a series of videos on how to configure and customize qtile so check out those videos if you're interested next up is spectre wm or spectrum if you prefer and i'm going to put spectre wm in the okay list right alongside of leftwm i i'm gonna basically say the same things i said about left wm spectrum like leftwm is a clone of exmoned except it uses a new user-friendly syntax and config file which is nice for new users it makes these liftwm inspector wm by using a friendly syntax and an easy config file they make xmonet or an xmonet like window manager much more approachable right much more new user friendly but at the cost of you can't quite extend them to the the point that you could extend something like x mode i think utah really gets it right because it basically made a clone of x mode ad but it still used a real programming language to do that and it's configured in that programming language python so that's why qtile is in the great tier and left wm and spectrum they have to be just in the okay tier one nice thing about spectrum is it does come with its own panel unlike left wing where you have to use a third-party panel spectrum has a built-in panel and it's pretty good and there's only two more window managers left and i bet people that have watched the channel know where i'm going with these so next up is stump wm and stump wm it really can only go in the yuck tier stump wm is one of those window managers that i have just struggled with i did a video my very first uh look at stump wm was probably two maybe three years ago and that video is very negative um maybe a little unfair like usually when i'm gonna trash a piece of free and open source software typically i try not to make the video i just decide not to make it at all but stump wm and it's frustrating it's a frustrating tiling window manager to use it's frustrating to config it's configured in common lisp it uses a lot of emacs like key chords key bindings so it's very similar to exwm right but not really exwm is just an extension of emac so if you know emacs you know exwm exwm is much easier to get into stump wm is tough and every six months or so i actually revisit stump wm i still have a config like every six months i'll be like you know what i'm going to spend a couple of hours and stump wm today i'm going to spend a couple hours with the config just so i can remember just so i can reevaluate to see if my opinion changes and it hasn't you know in the three years or so since i first took a look at it again about every six months you know twice a year i'll take a look at it again you know off camera for a few hours in a day and every time i i go back to it i still have the same opinion it's tough it seems limited one of the things that's crazy is i can't even change like the fonts in the panel it comes with a built-in panel they call it a mode line very similar to like a emax mode line but it comes with the font terminus by default that's the default font of that panel and i can't change it because it doesn't support xft fonts you know like modern font rendering and things like that there is like a library a lisp library i think it's called quick fonts that should fix that but it's no longer supported whoever was maintaining it i i don't know it's just weird having a tiling window manager that comes with a panel and the panel is kinda gimped no pun intended i would say as far as being new user friendly stump wm is as far from being new user friendly as a window manager can be so i definitely this is something you know if you want to check it out and you know you've been around the block a few times or maybe you just like lisp stump wm you'll probably have a better time with it than i did if you're a new user stay well away from it and last but certainly not least x-monette and of course you guys know where this is going to go it's going to be in the great tier x monad i shouldn't have to tell you that it's a great window manager because q-tile left the vm and spectrum are almost exact clones of exmonet and why did they basically design their tiling window manager to function basically exactly like x-moon adds because x monad got everything right the way it handles uh multi monitors and workspaces and it's dynamic it uses a lot of the same dynamic layouts like dwm it uses the master and stack layout by default it's just a really comfy window manager now let's talk about configuration because when it comes to being new user friendly x moned is not new user friendly it has great documentation fantastic documentation the documentation is go look up documentation about the haskell language haskell libraries because it's written and configured entirely in haskell now because the documentation is great you know that's that's important but you have to know a little haskell right most people are not going to be familiar with that particular programming language and that particular programming language tends to be a little more difficult to grasp especially for people that are new to programming unlike something like python for example that being said if you take the time to learn a little haskell learn some of the haskell libraries and learn some of the various extensions exmonette is extremely customizable extremely extensible probably one of the most extensible window managers out there maybe if i had to say it it's a second place an extensibility to awesome awesome that's probably ultimate as far as customization options in many ways x-moned is more suckless in nature than dwm and the fact that xmonet does not come with a panel by default although most exmo net users use x-mobar which is a panel written in haskell that's designed really to be used for x-moned but it's not part of the x-monad program itself so you don't necessarily have to use a panel which is nice because many tiling window managers actually don't bother with a panel at all so that's nice that it's not built into it so you're not you know forced into using it or at least that there's not source code built into the program for functionality you weren't going to use anyway so that's my tier list there once again let's cover the great tier i put three in it and i think those three had to be there there's no there's no way i could not put awesome q-tile and x-mode add in the great tier now some of the rest of them i i could have placed them differently bs pwm and dwm i think they're almost great like they're so close but yeah i can't you know if you gotta split hairs here and if we're creating a tier list you know i i've got to say bs pwm and dwm are just not on the level that's awesome q-tile and x-moon adds something got to be in that second good tier the okay tier left wms spectrum because they're just okay window managers like i'm okay with them i don't love them i don't hate them i'm just okay with them on the med tier herbslift and i3wm they're tiling window managers that i don't love you know i can use them but they're yeah yeah they're meh and the yuck here now the yuck tier is a definite i would i wouldn't change either one of these exwm and stump wm exwm would be fantastic if it wasn't an emacs plugin right the fact that emacs is single threaded makes it extremely unstable and because of that exwm has to be here stump wm for me has always just been a mess so that is my tiling window manager tier list i hope you guys enjoyed this maybe you want some more tier lists because honestly i wasn't sure how fun this would be but i enjoyed actually doing this if you want to see more of my opinions on tier lists rankings of various kinds of software let me know down in the comments below now before i go i need to thank a few special people i need to thank the producers of the show devin dodson gabe james max and matt michael mitchell paul scott west why you bald homie alan norman dragon chuck commander angry yokai dylan george lee lennox ninja marstrom my girl john alexander peace original polytechnic reality for less red private stephen and willie these guys are my high steered patrons over on patreon without these guys this episode you just watched would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon because i don't have any corporate sponsors right i'm just sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work i want to see more videos about free and open source software and linux and telling window managers subscribe to distro tube over on patreon these guys now go easy in the comments this was just my opinion

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 96,765

Keywords: awesome, bspwm, dwm, exwm, herbstluftwm, i3wm, leftwm, qtile, spectrwm, stumpwm, xmonad, tiling window manager, window manager linux, linux window manager, desktop environment, awesome window manager, window manager arch linux, best tiling window manager, window manager guide, linux tutorial, window managers compared, linux, gnu linux, linux for beginners 2022, windows vs linux, switch to linux, learn linux, distrotube, linux operating system, debian, ubuntu, linux mint

Id: xysISs0mcj8

Length: 26min 27sec (1587 seconds)

Published: Wed May 25 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/7_S3M_7]

I can't decide between awesome and qtile... Could you help me decide?