I fixed Windowlab

I always liked the look and feel of cozy little floating window managers with titlebars, but after using dwm for more than a year and bspwm for a couple months, I didn’t think I would ever be able to switch back to a non-tiling window manager. I have tried using plain Metacity, Openbox, Awesome in floating mode, twm, berry (which I’ve also forked) and many others, but they all seemed a little too impractical, and to be honest, pretty boring. Windowlab is the first window manager to satisfy all my needs, although it did need a little tweaking to resurrect this 21-year-old window manager for use in 2022.

Why Windowlab

Windowlab is very unique in terms of how it manges windows. While tiling window managers try to remove window overlap as much as possible to gain more “screen real estate” (which is actually not a very good analogy), Windowlab gives you very efficient ways of managing window overlap to get the most out of it. After all, isn’t it better to see two whole windows and a part of the others, than only seeing two whole windows with the same amount of content? I think it is, especially because that’s what X was made for!

Windowlab achieves this by having a click-to-focus but not raise-on-focus policy - yes, you have to raise windows yourself. The important thing here is that you can not only raise, but also lower windows on your demand, which allows you to quickly raise a window and then hide it again.

The menu bar of Windowlab is simple and efficient - in fact, as efficient as a menu bar gets, since, by constraining the mouse pointer only to move in one direction, it satisfies the Fitt’s law of usability: you just need to slam the cursor on top of the screen and then either left click on a window title to select and raise a window, or hold the right mouse button to show a menu of applications, specified in a dotfile.

What I’ve changed

Screenshots: