Margins - what WM?

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DrWoland · Post by **DrWoland** » Fri Mar 11, 2005 2:14 pm

I want a WM that is easily themed and has a wide theme base, but the most important feature to me right now is screen margins, like in Xfwm4.

http://www.drwoland.com/snapshot-March11.jpg

As you can see, I need the bottom of the screen not blocked to allow Yab to be visible. Xfwm4 does this fine, but finding themes for it outside of what's available is difficult. Does anybody have any suggestions on either

A. setting margins with Metacity
B. Converting Metacity themes to Xfwm4, or
C. Another WM that does margins and has lots of themes. Thanks.

cartpullerjack · Post by **cartpullerjack** » Fri Mar 11, 2005 9:43 pm

You might try enlightenment. It has a pretty wide theme base and it effective does screen margins automatically. In my opinion the D.A.E theme is the best one. I'll post a screenshot later on.

glug101 · Post by **glug101** » Fri Mar 11, 2005 10:20 pm

Enlightenment is definately a favorite of mine. It looks wonderful with the proper themes, plus it's fast and easily configurable. It is (however) a little hard to get used to at first, but well worth it. You should have seen how nice it ran on my p133.

cartpullerjack · Post by **cartpullerjack** » Fri Mar 11, 2005 10:28 pm

Also:

Where did you get that bar from? It looks pretty slick.

DrWoland · Post by **DrWoland** » Fri Mar 11, 2005 11:08 pm

cartpullerjack wrote:Also:

Where did you get that bar from? It looks pretty slick.

It's Yab (Yet Another Bar) - comes with adesklets. Do a search for adesklets on the forums, there's a thread about it. It's a fairly recent project, very light and dependency free. Fairly certain it uses imlib as well, so it'll work nicely with enlightenment, too. I'll have to look into running E16, but I wonder if I should just stick with XFWM until E17 comes out, since the bar is effectly engage. I'm not sure if I like engage's open window management though, I might just prefer having the launchbar for opening programs and a separate taskbar for keeping track of the open ones.

I'm also considering adapting the clock adesklet to work as part of the launchbar, all integrated and slick and stuff, or maybe even writing my own code for it.

cartpullerjack · Post by **cartpullerjack** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 5:33 pm

I promised screenshots, so here they are. They aren't perfect. I run a dual screen system, so to save your bw I did a slipshod job of cutting off the right hand screen.

At the bottom of the screen you see a couple of gdesklets on the left and in the middle. On the right is the enlightenment icon box with its borders removed. In the bottom left just above the system tray are two enlightenment pagers. E16 still uses the old multiple + virtual desktop scheme of desktop management, which both KDE and Gnome dropped in 3.0 and 2.0 respectively. The big blue bar on the left is of course gkrellm, but using the D.A.E theme, which I also am using for enlightenment. It has by far the largest selection of borders and dressings and the like. Plus, I just think it looks really slick.

Shot 1 is before maximization, and shot 2 is afterward. I haven't done anything special -- this is the default behavior of Enlightenment. It senses the boundary of the launchbar (which is actually higher in the screen than it looks) and won't let the bottom edge of the terminal cross it. If I was to slide the terminal a little lower so that the bottom edge overlapped the launchbar and then hit the maximize button, it would instead cover the launchbar.

Sorry if thats a bit wordy. Here are the shots (~900KB a peice):
http://www.math.gatech.edu/~lindsey/shot1.jpg
http://www.math.gatech.edu/~lindsey/shot2.jpg