Sometimes I think I’m a bit lazy to change my habits.
I’ve been looking at tiling window managers for a while, but I always failed to adopt one because of the big shift in habits it would have implied. This time, thanks to zack’s applet I decided to jump on the awesome bandwagon. And I’ve to say that I’m really happy about it. Since now I had never noticed how annoying was to move windows around. It is true that in the last year I’ve used guake as main console. Since it is a drop down and tabbed console, effectively it saved me the stress of placing a new window all the time I needed a new console. However there were still a lot of applications that were popping windows everywhere and I had no choice to find a place for them.
Awesome solves all these problems. Windows are positioned automatically. You can easily change from one layout to another using a key combination, it is very flexible (it’s configuration file is a program written in lua !!) and now thanks to zack’s applet is perfectly integrated with my gnome desktop. It basically replaces out of the box metacity (the default gnome window manager) just doing what awesome was meant to do : the window manager. You can disable all the extra features like the awesome panel and menus from the panel, and keep using gnome for everything else.
The other great tool I’ve just discovered thanks to an article on arstechnica is gtg . This is also a very handy tool. I’ve been using sticky notes for quite a while (both electronic and real ) but I’m far to be satisfied with it. I refuse to use tomboy as it uses mono and I prefer to avoid it (on religious grounds) . GTG follows the Get Things Done GTD methodology. At the end is just a friendly note taking tool with a lot plug-ins designed to be used with a keyboard. I’ve just started to use it and despite it already crashed on me few times I like it a lot.
Third and last (for this blog post) tool is a mind mapping tool. I’ve done mind mapping for a while : let’s say that I’m not a compulsive mind mapper but I enjoy putting things in place when I’ve time. In the past I’ve used freemind that is nice, but it crashed on me too many times. Alas, is written in java, and given my allergy to this language, I think this is just bad karma flowing in both directions… A couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon another mind mapping tool vym that is much more stable and a real pleasure to use. It didn’t crash once yet, it is very usable from the keyboard (essential when you are taking notes !) and it has a nice look & feel and a rich feature set. I’m happy it it.