Bill Clementson's Blog

What Emacs is to editors, Stumpwm is to window managers

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

In case I haven't been clear in my earlier blog posts (see some of them here), I like Emacs a lot. ;-) The thing I *really, really* like about it is that I can customize it with Lisp. I'll be working away and suddenly I will think of something I wish that I was able to do in Emacs. Usually, a quick google will show me that someone else has already thought of the same thing and written an elisp library for it. However, if there isn't something already out there, I will usually dive in and write it myself. The ability to dynamically change your working environment is one of the key reasons why so many programmers "live" in Emacs.

Until recently I haven't really played around much with different window/desktop managers in Linux. My primary desktop machine has always run either Windows or Mac OS X and any Linux work that I did was server-based. However, when I got my OLPC XO laptop, that changed. Since it was such a cheap laptop and I used it mostly while traveling (when I frequently have free time to burn on planes, airports, and hotel rooms), I played around a bit with different implementations of Linux and different window and desktop managers. At different times, I installed the Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu Linux distributions and tried out Sugar, XFCE, Gnome, KDE, and Ratpoison. In the end, for the XO, I decided to stick with Sugar as it works ok on the XO for what I need it for (when I'm traveling with it, I'm usually just reading ebooks, surfing the Internet, reading email, and listening to music). However, playing around with different configurations got me more interested in desktop Linux (I've been fairly happy as a Mac OS X user for the past few years). Of all the Linux distributions, I liked Ubuntu the best (easiest to find info about on the web and really well supported with frequent releases and updates).

Of the window/desktop managers, I really liked Ratpoison - a "minimalist" window manager that has a similar "feel" and "philosophy" (see here for some of the "early inspiration" for ratpoison ;-) ) to that of GNU screen, avoids dependency on mouse usage, and is very Emacs-friendly. People who like the Emacs way of doing things seem to like Ratpoison quite a lot. Ratpoison is written by Shawn Betts (who also wrote the original Conkeror). After using (and liking) Ratpoison, I saw that Shawn was working on a successor to Ratpoison called Stumpwm. Stumpwm is very much like Ratpoison (similar commands, look-and-feel, philosophy) but is written in Common Lisp. Although I tried Ratpoison on my XO, it was a bit problematic (given the extremely small keyboard and issues with the very small X11 fonts). I installed both Ratpoison and Stumpwm on my Macbook; however (since they don't work with Aqua), they're not as useful on OS X (see here for some considerations if you want to try them on OS X Leopard). If you use Mac OS X and you want to avoid using the mouse more than you have to, a better alternative is probably Quicksilver (which I've used for a few years now).

I've been running Ubuntu in a Parallels VM on Mac OS X for a few months now, so I decided to try out both Ratpoison and Stumpwm in the Ubuntu VM on my Mac. Both worked fine and I setup Stumpwm as my primary window manager. I gradually started using the VM more and more as I liked the ability to swap between full-screen applications and to easily customize my environment. Then, recently I installed Ubuntu 8.04 and Stumpwm on an older Windows laptop that I had. Since then, I've been really enjoying using Stumpwm/Linux on the cheap laptop and my expensive Macbook Pro has been sitting off to the side! I have even been toying with the idea of installing Ubuntu instead of OS X on my Macbook Pro (we'll have to see about that one!).

Male did an excellent Stumpwm screencast that shows what it's like to use Stumpwm, so I won't describe that here. However, I would like to demonstrate how it's usage (for a Lisp developer) is similar to Emacs. First of all, lets say you're running Stumpwm on your laptop and trying to type in Emacs. However, your hand keeps brushing the touchpad and moving the cursor. With Stumpwm, you can just (a) add some code to your .stumpwmrc file to toggle on/off the touchpad so that it doesn't interfere with your typing, (b) do a "slime-connect" to connect to the running CL and (c) evaluate the code - immediately, your window manager disables the touchpad for all applications that are running and hides the cursor (and you can just press "C-t T" to toggle it back on). Here's the necessary code:

(define-stumpwm-command "toggle-touchpad" ()
  "Toggle the laptop touchpad on/off.
   Need to have set 'Option SHMConfig' for Synaptics Touchpad
   device in xorg.conf."
  (let ((state (run-shell-command
		"synclient -l | grep TouchpadOff | awk '{ print $3 }'" t)))
    (case (string= (subseq state 0 1) "1")
      (t (shell-command "synclient TouchpadOff=0"))
      (otherwise (shell-command "synclient TouchpadOff=1")
		 (banish-pointer)))))

(define-key *root-map* (kbd "T") "toggle-touchpad")

;; Turn off Touchpad initially
(shell-command "synclient TouchpadOff=1")

;; Get rid of cursor initially
(banish-pointer)

(defcommand firefox () ()
  "Start/Switchto Firefox."
  (run-or-raise "firefox" '(:class "Firefox")))

(define-key *root-map* (kbd "f") "firefox")

(defun toggle-mode-line-hook (key key-seq cmd)
  (declare (ignore key key-seq cmd))
  (mode-line))

(add-hook *key-press-hook* 'toggle-mode-line-hook)