The StartX Files: Of Mice and Finns

By: Brian Proffitt
Monday, April 2, 2001 06:08:35 PM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/3201/1/

Giving The Two-Fingered Salute

I have been thinking about buying a three-button mouse.

I know this idea will seem to run counter to this week's introduction of a keyboard-centric window manager, but I felt like the mouse folks should get a fair shake out of this week's column, too. Or maybe I'm just throwing them a bone.

Regardless, I have been blithely typing away at this Linux box of mine for some time now, reaching over periodically to grab my two-button mouse and click one button, the other button, or maybe (in a real demonstration of my opposable thumb's power) both buttons. I have been consigned to contend with three-button emulation.

Which is a good plan--except that often it simply doesn't work. For whatever reason, three-button emulation does not always work as advertised on my machine. My colleagues, ever eager to prove their collective geek manhood, snidely imply that I am somehow inadequate in getting my two fingers to work together well enough. My typical response is to gesture at them with one particular finger and then go look for some clue as to why I cannot consistently use the emulator.

Of course, I should realize that anything with the word "emulator" on it should be enough to send me a warning sign. Like the ad says, "there ain't nothin' like the real thing." WINE, for instance, has always given me more fits than a hound dog twitching with fleas. I would like these emulators to work, I really would, but alas, they all seem to hate the sight of me looming over the keyboard.

Which finally brought me to this fateful decision: get off my butt and get down to the computer superstore (and we all know they'll love to see me coming) and buy a three-button mouse of my very own.

This is good timing, considering what I will be reviewing in the weeks ahead: window managers that for the most part try to avoid the use of the mouse altogether.

My timing, after all is said and done, leaves much to be desired.

The last (and only) time I was in Finland, it was passing through by train on my way from Stockholm to Leningrad. It was the middle of January, I had the most God-awful sinus infection, and I was in a train station in Helsinki.

But I would soon learn the joys of socialist medicine. After a brief trudge through the Helsinki city streets, I ended up in an apothacary, where it seemed cool to dispense antibiotics without a prescription. To this day, I think I love Finland more for that than anything Linus Torvalds has ever done. Sorry, Linus.

Still, I always look favorably on the products of Finland, and this week's window managers are no exception. Even without the favoritism for the Land of the Finns, PWM and ion would certainly be high on my list.

A Tale of Two Window Managers

There are, at my last count, three window managers with the label PWM. There's the Plate Window Manager, the Photon Window Manager, and then this one, the construct of one Toumo Valkonen.

PWM is described as a "lightweight" window manager for X, and I believe it. After pulling the tiny little 78 Kb Red Hat RPM down from the PWM site, I had it installed an running on my system in an eyeblink. Binaries are also available for Linux Mandrake (stable) and Debian (development), with the ubiquitous tarballs of source available in both stable and development packages.

PWM is a very simple little window manager with one nifty little feature: the capability to combine multiple windows into one frame. While this may not seem like a big deal, I soon found it to be very handy. All you do is grab a window's frame with the middle mouse button (or, in my case, the two-fingered maneuver) and drag and drop the window control into the frame you want. Nothing could be easier.

By linking separate instances of Netscape together, I was able to build a simulated multi-tabbed browser with all of my favorite Linux haunts. I even found a nice little trick in the documentation to edit the config file to create this automatically.

All of this, and it has workspaces too, as well as some WindowMaker adoptions, such as dockapp support. In all, pretty handy and clearly very fast. But not very keyboard oriented, is it?

This distinction belongs to PWM's cousin, ion. ion is also the creation of Valkonen and shares many of the characteristics of PWM. But in this instance, Valkonen was trying for something a bit more unique.

Citing the usability problems many current windowed interfaces have because of overlapping windows, Valkonen's ion removes this issue by not letting any window cover any other. Instead, ion divides the screen into separate frames, which--like PWM--can handle more than one client window. Because it's all laid out right there, switching back and forth among the windows no longer really needs a mouse.

That's the working theory. And in reality, that's what it does. But many of the ion commands are not entirely intuitive to the uninitiated, so I will give you a piece of advice that will go a long way with ion: open the man page for ion, print it out, and keep it beside you for a while next to the keyboard. Because ion is not something you are going to learn after a few minutes of diddling around--this is going to take a small investment of your time.

The payoff, I think, is worth it. After using ion for a few days, I hardly ever had to use my mouse. And the few times I did was more out of habit than anything else. Something to try for those who are looking for maximum functionality from their GUI.