Openbox
Openbox 3 is a pretty nifty window manager. What I like about it is that it is simple, has a powerful but simple configuration (even if it is XML), ICCCM and EWMH compliant, and works well in Gnome.
Now that I can dual-boot my iBook without the bother of a USB wireless card, I took a few minutes to set up my desktop environment. I used to periodically spend way too much time doing this. I was always on a quest for the best window manager and desktop systems, and I mostly steered clear of Gnome and KDE. Maybe I'm getting boring, but my list of must-haves for window managers has shrunk recently (maybe I should blame OS X). As I'm no longer the primary user on falcon (my wife is), we've been running Gnome there for awhile, and I've gotten used to it for casual usage. I used it for a few months at my last job too, and with a decent window manager (I used FVWM then) it can be quite nice.
So openbox easily displaces metacity with a simple openbox --replace and
saving the session. Once you find a theme that doesn't use itsy bitsy fonts it
looks fine too (I like the Serenity theme, although the colors are a bit off).
Openbox has the *box feature I love dearly: the dock. gkrellm -w and
WindowMaker dockapps I love dearly.
The keybindings and actions are not quite as rich as FVWM, but still quite good. On the other hand it does do MRU-style window switching (e.g. alt-tab), which is a feature mysteriously missing from FVWM.
Here is my ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml file. It matches the OS X keybindings I use most, and some others I made up which have proved quite useful in the past. Here's a preview (mentally replace cmd with meta or win, as appropriate):
- cmd-m to minimize (cmd-h doesn't offer anything more in the Gnome desktop, which is good because vi key emulation always trumps)
- cmd-w to close
- cmd-q to kill (use sparingly, this isn't quite the same as cmd-q in OS X)
- cmd-tab and s-cmd-tab (in addition to the more windows-like alt-tab and s-alt-tab)
- cmd-[hjkl] navigates desktops
- c-cmd-[hjkl] maximizes vertically or horizontally
- s-cmd-[hjkl] moves the window in that direction to the nearest edge. Openbox is the first WM I've seen with this action, and I anticipate that it will be very useful.
- cmd-t to spawn an xterm
- cmd-(up|down) to raise/lower a window