Recommend a tiling WM/Distro?

[IWantFroyo]

I've been using Debian 6 for a while, but I don't think it fits my needs anymore.
Here are my requirements:
-I use vim for a lot of my work now. So I have to have a good way to quickly open it.
-Switching between full screen apps.
-Light.

I've been looking into "tiling" window managers like evilwm, but I'm not sure which one to try.

[ninjaaron]

I've been using Debian 6 for a while, but I don't think it fits my needs anymore.
Here are my requirements:
-I use vim for a lot of my work now. So I have to have a good way to quickly open it.
-Switching between full screen apps.
-Light.

I've been looking into "tiling" window managers like evilwm, but I'm not sure which one to try.

evilwm isn't tiling. Scrotwm is. That's what I'm using, and I love it. you can hit super+shift+enter to open a terminal, and type vim. You could also make a custom command to launch a terminal with vim already open (ie: `whatever-terminal -e vim`). There are several helpful folks around here that helped me with it when I started, and I know how to do it now too, so I can also help. If you want gvim, you can launch it with the dmenu by pressing super+p and starting to type `gvim.` There is a package for it in Debian.

'awesome' is another popular tiling window manager, but it's configuration file is a lua script, which puts some people off (though it's not so terrible to learn). Other popular tiling window managers with a more difficult learning curve, but also more options are DWM and Xmonad, both of which are configured by editing and recompileing their source code. Scrotwm was inspired by these two window managers, but attempts to make them easier to configure.

If you want things like a taskbar, Awesome is probably a little easier. You can get a lot of task-bar type information in your bar via bash script or conky, however, in scrotwm. It just isn't interactive. Simplicity is the keyword with scrotwm, so it's quite bare-bonesb. It's not as bare-bones as evilwm. It manages an info bar, launching apps and keybindings. Of course, it also manages your windows. Evil just manages windows, and that's it. Awesome, on the other hand, is approaching a more complete DE, which you may like. If you think you'd like to try DWM or Xmonad, you'll have to ask someone else. I run away screaming whenever anyone mentions them. Too l33t for me.

[edit]
I don't think there is such a thing as a 'tiling distro,' though I hear that Kwin, the wm for KDE, has built in tiling features, so I guess any KDE distro would be a 'tiling distro,' like OpenSUSE or Chakra.

As far as distros where a lot of people use tiling wm's, It's really poplular with at lot of users of the BSD's (where a lot of this stuff originally comes from). They are also popular with Arch users, like me, but Arch is basically Linux wishing it was BSD. As such, the Arch Wiki is helpful for setting up tiling window managers.

[ilovelinux33467]

i3, awesome and Xmonad are my favourites.

[m_duck]

I'd probably recommend DWM first because its pretty simple and has quite sane defaults IMHO, so doesn't really need reconfiguring straight away. Having said that it isn't difficult to configure per se, but one must edit its source code (in C) to modify it, but that really isn't as daunting as it sounds.

My personal favourite tiler is WMFS. OOTB the keybinds are a bit strange but the configuration files are simple and flexible. Additionally it comes with a statusbar/tray (which can be disabled separately) and extra information can be added to it easily.

Of course if you want the most flexibility and power Awesome or XMonad are the direction to head but take more effort to configure - the former is configured in Lua (as ningaaron said) and the latter in Haskell. Of the two, I prefer XMonad.

I'd certainly recommend installing at least a few of them to see which you like best. I hated tiling WMs when I first tried them but after coming back to them a few times and trying different ones I enjoy using them now.

EDIT: I've only mentioned dynamic tilers here - some people prefer manual tiling. I am not one of them...

[dniMretsaM]

KDE (Kwin window manager) has built in tiling (full, left, right, left up, left down, right up, right down). Each position has it's own keyboard shortcut. And it's customizable in about a 1000 other ways, so it's pretty awesome. As for quickly opening Vim, I would suggest creating a custom launcher for it. Or Alt+F2 -> vim -> Enter. For switching between windows, use a task bar or a keyboard shortcut to switch between windows (default is Alt+Tab). I would also suggest using multiple desktops.

[IWantFroyo]

evilwm isn't tiling. Scrotwm is.

:facepalm:

I suppose that shows how little I really know about this stuff.
Thanks for all your replies, though! Especially thanks to ninjaaron. Installing scrotwm over my Debian right now. If I like it I'll probably switch from Debian to something more barebones, and install on that.

[ninjaaron]

:facepalm:

I suppose that shows how little I really know about this stuff.
Thanks for all your replies, though! Especially thanks to ninjaaron. Installing scrotwm over my Debian right now. If I like it I'll probably switch from Debian to something more barebones, and install on that.

Tip. All those times when I said "super+[...]" will be alt+[...] by default in Debian. It's a little bit older version than what I have, and the default has been changed. You can change it super if you wish (Mod4) by editing the config file. There is a line above all the keybindings that says something like...

modkey = Alt

... and you can change it to Mod4 or Ctrl (a bad idea) or even shift (a really bad idea), or a combination. It's sort of a law that applications don't use super for anything, so it's often used by window managers, and I would recommend it, though Alt doesn't usually pose a big problem either.

Scrotwm also comes with vim-related bindings by default, so that will be nice for you. Most of these WM's do, as they are sort of universal bindings known by most *nix heads.

[matthew.ball]

Hehehe, although ninjaaron is a definitive source on this matter (as is gutterslob), I'll just throw "stumpwm" into the mix.

It's written in common lisp (and modifications can be done "on-the-fly"), which is probably a foreign language to most people, but is rather easy to pick up (at least for small customisations).

I've found it works really nicely with Ubuntu (I would imagine, from the looks my .stumpwmrc file, it would work equally nicely for any Debian-spin though, including Debian).

[krapp]

Arch seems to have the greatest number of available WMs.
Debian has a fair number as does Ubuntu.

Most tiling WMs are easy to use, but a pain in the *** to set up. And they're far too bare-bone. I need a systray!

[ninjaaron]

Hehehe, although ninjaaron is a definitive source on this matter (as is gutterslob), I'll just throw "stumpwm" into the mix.

Don't you DARE call me the definitive source and then put gutterslob in parentheses! Serously, that guy is in another league altogether. He taught me everthing I know about scrotwm (well, mostly him, and some from the man page, and some from el_koraco).

I'm probably just the loudest user of scrotwm on the board, but there are plenty of other people who know as much and more than I do about it, and certainly much more about other tilers.

I might be able to tell some things about herbstluftwm soon, however, which not too many other people can do, if it doesn't defeat me first (it's a beast, but it gives almost infitite tiling options... which I'm not totally sure I want). The config file for that is written in Bash, which makes it pretty simple, but the design is insanely complex and precise. You can really feel how German it is when you use it (and I say that as an admirer of German craftsmanship).