My window managers have changed a few times over the years. I started off with OpenSTEP at Carleton, used that for a year. Then switched to Afterstep, which I used for about 3 years. Next I switched to sawfish/sawmill, and used it for about 4 years. Recently I went through a crisis as sawfish stopped working for me in testing on amd64. I found [ion3]{tag/ion3} to be a nice replacement. I was a happy ion3 user for almost a year and then someone suggested that I try [wmii-3]{tag/wmii}.

I don’t use a lot of X applications. The one that I use most often is xterm.

I like small fonts, and I find that I have no problem reading a small font on an LCD monitor. Recently someone mentioned the Terminus font. I tried it and it quickly became my favored xterm font… it’s so tiny and clean! Here are the important bits of my .Xdefaults file…

    XTerm*renderFont:        false
    XTerm*font:              -xos4-terminus-medium-r-normal-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

I also grabbed a few tiny fonts from Proggy Fonts and my new wmii font is ProggyTiny. Here is the bit from my .wmii-3/wmiirc-config.rb file…

    font        '-windows-proggytiny-medium-r-normal--10-80-96-96-c-60-iso8859-1'

The above font site also taught me how to import fonts into X font server w/o a restart and how to keep fonts in my home directory. Check out this short HOWTO.

I ran into a strange bug with firefox locking up each time I pushed a form submit button. When I ran it from the console I had an endless stream of:

    mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent()
    mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent()
    mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent()
    mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent()
    mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent()
    mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent()
    mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent()
    mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent()

Googling for it revealed an intresting thread which dates this bug to firefox 1.0. Grr.

So it turns out that I have not blogged about [ion3]{tag/ion3} yet. I’ve been using ion3 as my window manager for about half a year, and I still love it. It’s fast, does not requrie a mouse for most tasks, and has very powerful scripting and keyboard binding capabilities. But enough about the greatness of ion3… and onto the rest of the story…

For some time I wanted to have a magic key binding that would do something – anything – with my X selection. Say, I highlight a URL and push this magic key, it should display it in a new browser tab. If I highlight what looks to be a valid file, it should launch gvim on it, etc. I previously tried with sawfish, but I suffer from a serious condition that causes me to vomit when I look at lisp-like languages – one of the reasons I abandoned emacs years ago.

It was pretty easy in ion. Below is my [lua]{tag/lua} code to implement what I described…

(Don't get too excited... it may not be what you think)

I have been using sawfish for many years now, and written a few custom hacks for it. My current theme is Tlines. I've tried most the other window managers and come back to sawfish every time I get adventurous, because sawfish is so bloody configurable.

Recently I started using the following settings, as a very cool time saver:

• focus = enter-only
• root-window binding 'button1-click2' locks my screen
• root-window binding 'w' start galeon
• root-window binding 't' start 3 vertical non-overlapping terminals
• root-window binding 'g' start gimp + gqview (also non-overlapping)