StumpWM

I've been a GNU screen user for a long time, and recently I went in search of tiling window managers that would emulate its behaviour for the rest of my desktop. I found Ratpoison first, which mostly did what I wanted but lacked a mode line equivalent. Next I found StumpWM

I like it.

Its mostly the same UI as screen. The default escape key is C-t rather than C-a (I changed mine back to C-a since I wanted to use it as a complete screen replacement as well as a window manager). Another minor difference is you can't display the same window in two regions like you can in screen, which is primarily an X11 limitation, but does make it less intuitive when you want to swap two windows and there's only two windows open (the dedicated keys/commands for doing this actually make it faster, but its sent me to the manual every time so far).

The config file is in common lisp (as is the whole application) which takes some getting used to, but ultimately it was nice to have a full programming language available. I learned a little common lisp just to use it. The usual screen-style commands are also around, but they aren't used in .stumpwmrc unless you enclose them in a lisp statement ((run-commands 'my-screenish-command')). This also creates another screen difference: C-a : brings up a lisp evaluation prompt, not a prompt for screen-type commands. C-a ; will do that, and the motivation was that the latter was easier to type, but for familiarity's sake, I remapped the two into each other's place.

Workspaces can be dealt with by names or numbers, with C-a F[1-10] bringing up the first 10 workspaces. I ended up just setting up some mappings in the config file that would make it behave like Metacity did for my 4 main workspaces, but having easy access to further workspaces without having to compromise my 2D "sense" of their position is convenient for those special cases when I have more windows than usual.

Stability wise its not been everything I dreamed of. It has occasionally crashed when closing certain windows, and a few of the config options don't seem to work (which is why my modeline is still on top). This could also have something to do with the shoe-horning that I had to do to get it into a full GNOME session.

Lastly packaging issues. The Makefile is non-autoconf and didn't have a good way to install to RPM_BUILD_ROOT, so my specfile installed manually. Then disaster: the binary was corrupt when I built into an RPM. This seems to have something to do with prelink. Even when I managed to get the md5 issues to disappear, the executable was 1/4 the size it was when I built it manually and complained of missing libraries that the manually-built version didn't. I'll be asking our clisp maintainer about this issue. I'd like to be able to use it as a fedora package.