Posted by Jim at August 29th, 2005

This entry is far too geeky for most people to even care, but… I do care. My apologies to the 99.9% of humanity who doesn’t (very few of which are reading this blog…).

I’ve been messing around with my FreeBSD box lately, trying to make it habitable for personal use (as opposed to server use). Thus, I’ve been experimenting with window managers. Window managers (for those of you who don’t know and are yet still reading) are programs that dictate how your computer manages the windows in which programs appear. It manages how they look and all the things you can do with them.

All Microsoft Windows really allows you to do is minimize, maximize, close and switch windows. Some window managers allow you to do more than that. Enlightenment is one of them.

What I like about Enlightenment:
–It looks good. Better, at any rate, than most window managers for Unix.
–It allows you to keep programs on your desktop as the bar on top of the program (you know, the one that says the program’s name), but everything else disappears. Mac OS used allow you to do that, but I haven’t been able to find out how in OS X.
–It allows you a lot of other options as well, but I really haven’t used them

What I dislike:
–The common problem with open source stuff… There are so many options that they intimidate me and I’ve never gotten around to using even a third of them.
–The way it handles multiple desktops. In Unix, after all, you typically have access to 4 desktops instead of just one. If you move your mouse pointer slightly too far to the left or right, you automatically move over to the next desktop, causing all the programs you’re working with to disappear and leaving you to wonder what happened. Undoubtedly this will seem second nature to me at some point, but it isn’t yet. It just makes me think of the stupid windows menu key on my keyboard, something that I only hit accidently, constantly knocking me out of the program I’m working with and into a menu I didn’t want to open.
–Desktop clutter: In addition to the icons that I’ve dumped on the desktop, there are three other windows that are always open by default. Two of them show little representations of what’s open on the 4 desktops available (2 desktops per window–this is, admittedly, kind of cool). The third shows representations of what all your minimized programs look like–also cool. Sadly, I never really need them and thus they just clutter up my screen.

Overall, I do like the enlightenment window manager, but the things I don’t like grate on my nerves at the moment. We’ll see if they do in the future.

That being said, I should mention that the last time I used enlightenment (5 years ago…) it was notoriously unstable. It isn’t anymore (I’m using Enlightment 16 now). It works just as well as anything else.