It's a miracle we could ever choose just one and get to work. Back in my Linux days it was PWM for me. https://tuomov.iki.fi/software/

WindowMaker, then FVWM were my drugs. I used tiling window managers for a while, when my typical workstation was a laptop, but now that I have a large-ish screen (27") on a desktop they're pretty bad -- everything is either too wide to be useful, or too narrow. Ratpoison was definitely my favourite (I also use Emacs, figures...), but I liked wmii, too. By the time I ran into pwm I was hooked into Ratpoison :).

LXQT does its job for me these days. It's not the most polished but at least it doesn't go out of its way to make my desktop look and act like a tablet so I'm happy with it.

I've been toying with writing a Wayland compositor that does wmii-like tiling, but can also do proper floating window management, but I have to wait for things to settle on the Wayland front before writing anything that's useful...

Edit: whoever downvoted you clearly never had a few hours of fun on a Friday night tweaking FVWM only to find out it's 4 AM now and oh crap it's also Monday!

> Edit: whoever downvoted you clearly never had a few hours of fun on a Friday night tweaking FVWM only to find out it's 4 AM now and oh crap it's also Monday!

I'm still sorry about my FVWM config. It was almost perfect. I should search for it in backups.

still using fvwm2, haven’t found anything that comes close.

so do I. Although I discovered it rather late - in 2004. It's remarkable how configurable it is. I adopted some version of what this guy did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdSgf-IykIo to do "manual tiling". Also can't find anything modern that even remotely can compare.

+1 for ratpoison - no rodent dependence!

Tuomo Valkonen's Ion was my saviour for easily a decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_(window_manager)

I can't, which is why I don't install Arch. The temptation when you aren't given a default is too strong.

Oh gawd, I spent so much time looking at that site and searching for the "best" wm. As my main WM, I've used fvwm (which I think was the default on slackware back then), olvwm (since I was used to Sun Unix machines from a summer job...), afterstep/windowmaker (NeXT was cool), fluxbox, kde 1.x-3.x, xmonad.

Nowadays I'm just using gnome with pretty much default configs.

I stopped using sawfish like a year ago. I had so many customizations for it that I didn't want to switch.

Funny to think that writing a window manager once seemed like quite a good use of one's time. I wonder what today's equivalent is.

I still in theory maintain one of mine (wmx), and this thread just prompted me to go and fix a few warnings that newer compilers come up with. Egads, there's some grubby code in there.

> I wonder what today's equivalent is.

Writing your own web framework?

Hey, I remember wmx! That was pretty fun actually! Back in my super-minimalist phase, right between WindowMaker and ratpoison, I actually used it for a while!