[indiana-discuss] pkg search tip for fellow newbies

[Calum Benson]

On 21 Jul 2008, at 14:08, Kevin Monceaux wrote:

> Gnome Fans,
>
> On Sun, 20 Jul 2008, Calum Benson wrote:
>
>> On 17 Jul 2008, at 18:32, Kevin Monceaux wrote:
>>
>>> DWM can be controlled completely via the keyboard, which is one of  
>>> the
>>> reasons I like it so much.
>>
>> As can metacity/GNOME, FWIW... anything that can't should be filed as
>> an accessibility bug, as we aim to have full keyboard coverage.
>
> Fare enough.  But, there are many other reasons I choose DWM over  
> Gnome.
> And I'm sure many of the reasons I like it would be reasons others  
> would
> steer clear of it.  Some of it's highlights include:
>
>     *  The only window decoration is a 1 pixel wide border.

You can always theme GNOME's window manager to do this as well, if  
that's what floats your boat.

>        Plus, one of the biggest
>        selling points for me is there's no "task bar", Gnome panel, or
>        anything remotely similar anywhere.

Well, you're not really comparing like with like, there-- none of  
those features are provided by GNOME's window manager, but by other  
parts of the GNOME desktop environment that you're quite at liberty to  
turn on or off independently of metacity (GNOME's equivalent of dwm).

Conversely, you can swap out metacity and replace it by any other  
window manager, whilst retaining those other GNOME desktop features.   
(Although EWMH-compliant WMs work best with GNOME-- dwm isn't one of  
those, but you could use its close relative echinus instead.)

>     *  It can be completely keyboard driven, as I mentioned  
> earlier.  I
>        can start a rxvt-unicode terminal session by hitting
>        <Mod1><Shift><Enter>, for example.  I can move/resize windows  
> via
>        the keyboard, switch tags my hitting <Mod1>F##, etc., etc.

Yep, all do-able with metacity too.  (Except the tag-switching, as  
metacity doesn't currently have tags-- but the sort-of-equivalent  
workspace features are all available from the keyboard too.)

>
>     *  In addition to all of the above, the entire window manager is
>        contained in 1 .c file and a couple of .h files.  Including
>        comments and all dwm.c is all of 1,753 lines long.  How many  
> lines
>        of code is Gnome?  Any guess which one is faster and less  
> stressful
>        on system resources?

 From a quick 'wc', metacity is roughly 30x as many lines of code, so  
yes, DWM is certainly a tidier beast on that front.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.benson at sun.com            GNOME Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems