Hi all,

As many of you remember, I spent a significant chunk of time delving
into ctwm: An ultra-configurable and ultra-small-resource WMDE. I've
used it, in a stable configuration, on my Daily Driver Desktop (DDD) for
well over a month now.

During that month, I found some ctwm idiosyncracies continued to
confound and annoy me even after a solid month of use. Most of these
annoyances fall into one of three categories:

1) Window placement
2) Focus
3) Alt+Tab functionality

WINDOW PLACEMENT:
The windows often open partially off the screen, or the wrong size. As
a result, I have to reach for a mouse all too often, and that's bad
for productivity.

FOCUS:
On Win9x, KDE, Openbox, Xfce, and most other widely accepted WMDEs,
Focus means both on-top and receiving keystrokes, unless you've taken
extraordinary steps like declaring a window always on top. On ctwm the
properties of on-top and receives-keystrokes are independent, making
for some strange situations, especially when using ctwm sans-mouse as I
do. I often have to revert to a mouse or hit one or more extra
key-combos to get the complete focus users of win9x like WMDEs, xfce,
KDE and Openbox expect and take for granted.

ALT+TAB FUNCTIONALITY
There are two different window organization methods: Ring and stack. In
a ring configuration, to transition from one window to another on a
given workspace, you keep going forward (or backward) through the
circle til you get to the desired window. To get back to the original,
you go the opposite direction the same number of times. I have hotkeys
to go both backward and forward via Alt+Tab and Alt+Grave, and I can
tell you even after a couple months of use, I can't move between
windows using the sub-brains in my fingers: I have to use the same
brain I write and program with.

In a stack configuration, the currently focused window is at the top of
the stack, with the previous focused window just under it in the stack,
on and on until the longest-ago used window is at the bottom of the
stack. When a new window gets focus, it goes to the top of the stack.

With a stack configuration, you have only one window-switching hotkey:
Usually Alt+Tab. Your first Alt+Tab points to the window below the
top-stack window. As you keep hitting Tab while holding Alt, it goes
lower in the stack, until you release the Alt key, at which time the
window at that lower stack point gets focus and gets moved to the top
of the stack. One beauty of this is that no matter how many windows,
Alt+Tab followed by a release of Alt brings up the previous focused
window, enabling you to toggle between just two. This is useful in a
wide variety of situations. Moreover, even stuff two and three windows
down is eventually learnable by muscle memory, whereas with ring
configurations it never becomes that subconscious.

So ctwm already has an Alt+Tab deficit, and worse yet, while you're
Alt+Tabbing with your thumb still on Alt, ctwm gives no feedback of the
window that would focus if you let go at that point. It can become very
trial and error and very confusing. But Openbox gives clear, foreground
feedback of which window would surface if you lift your fingers off Tab
and then Alt.


CONCLUSION:
Ctwm is an excellent, ultra-configurable WMDE, and properly configured,
I highly recommend it. I'll continue to help people with it. But I
personally have switched back to Openbox because it better fits with my
workflow and productivity methods.

I have reason to believe that ctwm is lighter weight than Openbox, but
both are so lightweight that only the skimpiest and oldest systems
would showcase the difference between their weights.

And unlike ctwm, Openbox is already represented by a Devuan package.

SteveT

Steve Litt
October 2017 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21