Emacs X Window Manager
199 points by DyingAdonis 9 years ago | 50 comments- kjhughes 9 years agoThere are screenshots on the wiki: https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm/wiki
- webkike 9 years agoIn all honestly this is all I've ever wanted out of a window manager.
- cottonseed 9 years agoMe too. I've been hoping someone would integrate webkit in Emacs. Then I could go full screen and that would cover 98% of what I want to do. This might be even better, except that these days I'm usually stuck in IntelliJ on OSX.
- bentcorner 9 years agoI've used Ratpoison in the past which seemed like a decent tiling WM. I don't have a ton of experience with it but the little I tried seemed to work as expected.
- mbrock 9 years agoI've been using Ratpoison since like 2005 or something. Pause for a few years while I was using OS X, and then I'd just put everything in fullscreen or on different workspaces. The tiling stuff in Ratpoison works well enough, but it's not super sophisticated and personally I almost never use it except when I'm like transcribing something. I'm using Ratpoison on a high-DPI laptop right now, I just upped my DPI and use huge fonts and everything's in fullscreen. It's lovely!
- mbrock 9 years ago
- ddalex 9 years agoTry i3. I did, and never looked back.
- cottonseed 9 years ago
- davexunit 9 years agoAwesome hack. I really need to try this sometime. I spent almost all of my digital life in Emacs anyway, so this could work out very well for my workflow.
- michaelhoffman 9 years agoI would love to run this. I'm a bit worried that there is only a "certain degree of concurrency" promised in the XELB library it's built on. Seems like there would be many ways for this to get blocked. `list-packages` might stall my whole system, not just Emacs.
- guessbest 9 years agoThis reminds me of SXEmacs : http://www.sxemacs.org/
- jevgeni 9 years agoSweet baby Jesus, it has happened.
- calpaterson 9 years agoEmacs long ago (decades) expanded to read mail. There are probably multiple mail clients in GNU emacs now
- philjackson 9 years agoI've gone from Gnus to Wanderlust finally settling on mu4e. The first two were probably more a gimmick where mu4e actually enables me to get things done.
- asjo 9 years agoOne of those "gimmicks" has been working great for me the past 20+ years...
- asjo 9 years ago
- weland 9 years ago
- cmiles74 9 years agoI use the notmuch extension for Emacs (with mbsync for actually fetching the mail and msmtp for sending) and have been very happy with it.
- jevgeni 9 years agoI know. :) But I was hoping that the Great Emacs Envelopment won't happen.
- philjackson 9 years ago
- gpvos 9 years agoI wouldn't be surprised if emacs was the original inspiration for Zawinski's Law.
- zeckalpha 9 years agoParticularly since he has done so much for emacs and email.
- zeckalpha 9 years ago
- calpaterson 9 years ago
- kevin_thibedeau 9 years agoTake that xemacs, all stuck inside your managed window.
- merraksh 9 years agoAnother Emacs-based window manager (http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/new-window-manager....) was featured on HN about 6 months ago:
- JulianMorrison 9 years agoNeeds a text editor. Has anyone ported Vi?
- JupiterMoon 9 years agoYes. Evil mode.
NB I'm not condoning editor warring. Just pointing out that one can use arguably the best bit of vi/vim in emacs (the keybindings).
- JupiterMoon 9 years ago
- chjj 9 years agoI thought emacs already had an X11 window manager built-in.
In all seriousness, this is pretty cool, and it uses libxcb. Nice.
- zarkone 9 years agorelated: elisp x11 (in russian, but with screenshot): https://www.linux.org.ru/gallery/screenshots/7805904
- seba_dos1 9 years agoWill have to try it on my mobile phone together with fso-el :) https://github.com/paulfertser/fso-el/wiki
- adultSwim 9 years agoEmacs is a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor :-P
- chousuke 9 years agoNot anymore: https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs
Seriously though, this joke has unbeliveable staying power, despite being almost as old as emacs itself.
- fanf2 9 years agoThe problem with this joke is that Emacs is actually a terrible operating system: very poor concurrency support and no pre-emption.
- chousuke 9 years ago
- vander_elst 9 years agoemacs is a great operating system, it lacks a good editor though
- broodbucket 9 years ago
M-x recycle-joke - lojack 9 years agoshould be relatively trivial to install vim
- broodbucket 9 years ago
- znpy 9 years ago...wow. I might just get off The bed and try it right now.
- DonHopkins 9 years agoDoes M-< C-@ M-> C-W delete all your windows?
- mhurron 9 years agoSee a doctor, you may be having a seizure.
- gpvos 9 years ago
M-x doctor- DonHopkins 9 years agoRMS -vs- Doctor, on the evils of Natalism
- DonHopkins 9 years ago
- gpvos 9 years ago
- mhurron 9 years ago
- emacs27 9 years agoVery impressive and very useful for certain Emacs workflows.
Also, something tells me the creator of this project and its users won't feel the need to spam HN and r/programming with regular updates on the progress of the project in an attempt to raise the profile of the language it was written in--unlike what we saw with a certain other tiling window manager a few years back.
- dangirsh 9 years agoAs a happy emacs and xmonad power user, I'd love to see more of both!
Why so defensive?
- johnchristopher 9 years agoWhich window manager are you referring to ?
- jeorgun 9 years agoI'm going to assume from context that they're talking about xmonad.
- jeorgun 9 years ago
- emacs27 9 years agoIn fact, there is already a Lisp (Common, not Emacs) tiling WM called StumpWM.
If you haven't heard of it yet, it's partly because the Lisp community isn't so embarrassingly insecure and desperate for anything they can pass off as a "killer app" (see Macsyma or Emacs itself) that they feel compelled to shove it down everyone's throat.
- arianvanp 9 years agoWhy the attitude? Can we just sit down, relax, and enjoy the awesome hack that this is without being all "we're too cool for hacker news"? . I'm really glad someone shared this today as it really brought a smile to my face.
- TurboHaskal 9 years agoAnd that's exactly why Common Lisp is fading into obscurity while the "embarrassingly insecure" Clojure community is making the language take over.
- yenda 9 years agoThe sad truth
- yenda 9 years ago
- lispm 9 years agoActually there are lots of X11 window managers in many languages.
If we look at Common Lisp, window managers are not new.
https://common-lisp.net/project/eclipse/
https://common-lisp.net/project/clfswm/
Well known is Stumpwm:
https://github.com/stumpwm/stumpwm/wiki
It's easy to write a minimal WM in Common Lisp:
- DonHopkins 9 years agoI'm insecure and desperate for anything I can pass off as a "killer app" for Forth and pie menus, so here's an X10 window manager (yes, X10 not X11) with pie menus that's extensible in Forth:
- DonHopkins 9 years ago
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- arianvanp 9 years ago
- dangirsh 9 years ago