This week in Arch Linux’s news letter there was an interview with Ion’s creator Tuomo Valkonen. Ion is a complete desktop environment built on the tiling windowmanager PWM. It uses Lua as an embedded interpreter which handles all of the configuration. It mainly uses the keyboard to access the functions but also supports the mouse for some things.
Maybe a little too deep for the average Osnews reader but a thoughtful read nevertheless.
I admit that I’m an Ion zealot and agree with most of this guys opinions but I don’t think that XML is that bloody ugly (eg Bash is uglier). It may not be meant for human reading in the first place but both Openbox and Fontconfig uses it for configurations.
— xerxes2
Ion is especially great on laptops, where the trackpad isn’t a usable option.
Yes it is and it’s not wasting your monitor space either.
And a little correction. I did the interview and also wrote the Arch Ion3 wikipage and PWM3 is just Ion3 configured a bit differently. It was just the first version of Ion that was “hacked over PWM”. Tuomo just mailed me that to get it right. He also gave me this link that may explain it better. http://iki.fi/tuomov/pwm/
— xerxes2
I have to say the developer sounds like a bit of a … well to use a nice word: extremist … but it’d be cool to see a window manager that’s more keyboard enabled.
Still, I like my free floating windows. Even if they aren’t very pretty to manipulate with keyboard shortcuts.
I just setup Ion, and then I saw this article. Coincindence!?!?
Wow, I never knew I had this much screen real-estate. A real, get out of your way WM. Loving it.
Switched from e16, which I like, but got tired of having to leave a big section of the bottom of my screen open just to be able to switch workspaces.
Once you get the hang of the ion shortcuts, it’s a real breaze to use.
The best, at least after changing it to use Mod = WinKey.
ma_d: You can both have the cake and eat it. Just create a WFloatWS workspace/frame.
I’ve been a Mac user since 1987, but last year I switched to Gentoo and then Ubuntu after getting tired of Apple’s bullshit. I recently started using ion2 as my GNOME window manager instead of metacity. It is so refreshing to not have to deal with overlapping windows and all the wasted time and frustration they cause. My only complaint is that I wish ion used python instead of lua.
Some years ago I used larswm( http://home.earthlink.net/~lab1701/larswm/ )which IMHO is still the best window manager for X… if it wasn’t for all the broken X apps, so later I switched to Ion, and used it for about two years, I was not completely happy with it, but it was simple enough, and didn’t have much problems with most X apps I used… then came Ion2 and Lua, and with much frustration and pain I updated my very customized configuration files.
Last year I played around with wmi( http://www.wmii.net ), it showed promise but had many rough edges, after a complete rewrite, now called wmii, the defaults are very good and rarely I have to tune them, the file-system interface allows you to do changes on the fly from the command line(and soon to mount it via http://v9fs.sf.net ), also it’s window management is much more smart and dynamic than ion’s, all in all I’m much happier and I would recommend all Ion users to give it a try, it’s dynamic nature takes a bit to get used to, but after a while it feels much better.
In Ion3 at least, you can create floating virtual desktops too. So you can have 2 with frames and 1 floating for programs like GIMP.
I’m a user of Ion3 and I think it’s great, I would love to see cleaner config files, but that’s tied to Lua integration and I really don’t care
You can see its a different set of requirements when he comes to the part about managing stacks of terminal windows, and when he refers to gnome.
For the very non-technical user, the desktop concept, and windows one on top of another which roughly correspond to documents one on top of another on a desk, makes sense and is easy to manage. Of course, if you get more sophisticated, it just gets in the way.
What this shows is, one size does not fit all…
I have quite opposite feeling of using Ion. It’s a nice test to find better ways to use, but i failed to see it as being better than normal way. I could say it’s horrible to use first, very how would i say uninnutive. After while using it comes lot easier, but i still like more traditional way. I also fail to see your laptop point, why wouldn’t trackpad(touchpad) be usable option?
I think most of people will use traditional way long time. I still recomend everyone to test Ion, but don’t put too much hope on it.
I was pretty skeptical about ion, but when I first tried it out (I think when ion2 was released) I was amazed to find it stuck. I now find myself frustrated with the inadequacies of other WMs now (particularly metacity).
I love ion3. If only applications had session support for ion3
I must say that I think Tuomos hissyfits against antialiased fonts are just ridiculous. The blurb on the ion3 site about how it’s a hack and that the way it should be is to have monitor resolutions big enough so you can’t see the individual pixels made me cringe.
While it might be true, it just smacks of religion. What you like to read is also highly subjective (and he speaks of subjective usability).
I certainly find that good screen fonts with clear antialiasing are more legible than non-antialiased old school screen fonts.
All in all, I find ion3 to be the most promising WM that would ultimately bring me farthest in terms of forming constructive habits, but the lack of application support for it from the applications adds a lot of hassle to the initial adoption of any new application.
I do find Tuomos extremist attitude a drawback though; it’s the kind of thing that leads to a project taking a wrong turn down the road. It wouldn’t be the first time something that could have been great goes awry, just because a key player has this all-or-nothing attitude.
I agree completively. I too like Ion but I don’t really like Tuomo. He’s attituded sucks, big time. I hate to read anything he has to say about anything even though if I do agree with him in many ways.
I too used to think that antialiased fonts suck. However, after I got them configured correctly I couldn’t live without them. AA fonts don’t look blurry on a well configured Linux desktop.
Too bad, because of the attitude of Tuomo there will probably never be support for AA fonts in Ion.
Ion supports drawing engine modules and there will be AA support in Ion when someone writes and _starts maintaining_ an Xft-enabled drawing engine (substituting some routines in the default by inheritance). I (Tuomo) do not want to maintain such a thing, and therefore I do not accept #ifdef kludges to the default engine. Attempts to add blurry-font support to Ion have been of this kind thus far.
Also apparently some kind of support to turn off AA has finally been added to Cairo recently, so it may be an option in the future for even fancier drawing engines. Previously the high-level routines overrode fontconfig settings, so there was no way to turn off AA without lots of extra work. Such brain-damage is a very good reason to boycott a library.
Tuomo, I am not so worried about the AA fonts, since I could put them in there myself if I thought it was important.
I am more worried about developers using words such as “boycott” in software development. It’s not a very pragmatic approach.
Like Anonymous right after me notes, I really agree with you on most things you have to say. You have some very good ideas about usability and some good points about existing interfaces.
It’s more the way in which you take a stance against something like AA fonts based on what I find to be highly subjective arguments.
I am worried this might happen with other emerging technologies that you might not personally see the point of.
Your harsh treatment of every subject you disagree with also signals to others that suggesting things for ion runs you the risk of being mocked mercilessly.
Boycott is pretty much the only way left to fight a mob (fdo, gnome, etc.) that actively tries to make it practically impossible to have beautiful and crisp fonts in X. Their unblurred TTF font rasterizer sucks bigtime, at least without some proprietary bytecode or something (no wonder people say unblurred fonts in X are ugly), and yet default fonts.confs are full of kludges to prevent the use of beautiful old X bitmap fonts: X fonts aren’t even on font path, and there are kludges in place to specifically refuse the use of Helvetica and replace it with the fugly Bitstream Vera or something.
As for including every single suggested feature in Ion, I ask you, who’s gonna maintain it when the random contributor has found the next cool WM? Me? I don’t have the time and will to maintain things I don’t even like. If someone feels so strongly about a feature that they’re actually willing to maintain it, well, it’s fre software, and they can easily fork the program too. Keeping up-to-date on the changes to my version is easy thanks to the excellent decentralised version control system known as darcs. It shall later be seen if the fork’s maintenance field record merits merging their changes back to my version.
Isn’t it just a matter of doing exactly what you are suggesting with regards to AA in Ion? Write it yourself?
Why would they want to maintain code for a non-AA font rasterizer when the majority of users (and apparently developers of fdo, gnome, etc) don’t care about it?
How does you boycotting fdo, gnome, etc in any way make things better for ion?
I am not at all suggesting that you should include every single feature in ion that is suggested. I am not even suggesting that you write AA into ion, since I completely understand not wanting to spend time writing software that is against something you believe in.
I am just pointing out that your irate ranting on the subject are likely to be scaring off users. I have a pretty high tolerance for passionate ranting, since I like doing it myself – I just think it’s a pity that a piece of software as great as Ion might have to struggle harder for acceptance (which you may not care about, but the users probably care) because the lead developer is busy decrying the main wm developers as idiots and popular features as being “stupid hacks”.
It’s fine that you feel that way, but I think you would meet less resistance if you turn down the heat a bit.
That said, I think that it’s nice that you are taking the time to reply to me, and I think your WM rocks. Just play nice with the other kids
It’s odd that I should find myself writing this, since I am usually on the receiving end of this particular argument.
I can understand them not wanting to write a decent unblurry TTF rasterizer. It may not even be possible to distribute such a thing due to absurd notions of (intellectual) property. What’s the problem is that they’re actively trying to make it very difficult — impossible for the average user — to use the existing beautiful bitmap X fonts, although the code is there. Thus the average user will never even know of better.
It should also be noted that the feature set of a core library that a lot of programs use — may even have to use — is a _very_ different matter than that of a marginal application with a few handfulls of users. Ion is not even trying to please except a handful of people, and nobody has to use it, but those libraries are going for world domination and everyone practically has to use them, even if didn’t want to. (As a related note, Gnome’s sole existence makes my life harder even though I personally refuse to touch it with a 100 kilometre long stick. KDE’s hasn’t so far, at least not considerably.)
If you disagree with boycotting, then what do you suggest one to do? Go along with and support all the shit they’re pushing? Do that and one day something like Ion will be impossible. (I’m anxiously waiting for the day when Gnome decides to override the window manager altogether and have all apps manager their windows by themselves, etc. Given their track record and what is their paragon, it is to be feared.) Maybe the cairo people infact heard that I abandoned cairo plans some months ago and wrote the AA setting routines only after that… I’ve had arguments with some of them before.