I have always hated and despised the Caps Lock key. Not only it is useless to anybody who works writing code, sysadmining, or plainly writing real text, but its mere existence has degraded the work quality of millions of people's work. Suddenly, IT GETS NORMAL TO WRITE LIKE THIS - It's just a magic spell that allows you to get rid of those old-fashioned rules about the language, about where to write in which case. Even worse, in Spanish some people tend to think that uppercase letters do not carry accents, so they produce text that is, um... Lets say it is readable, but that's often an overstatement.
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I have been a happy and loyal user of
Window Maker since 1997, when
Juan Pablo Romero pointed me to it (BTW, I found Juan Pablo's homepage after searching for some links to post here and finding his, very old and probably unmaintained,
WindowMaker page), back in the time where one of my favorite webpages was
Window managers for X - clear sign that I didn't really like anything I had been using. And with WMaker, I was happy for (WOW) almost ten years. I still am. But after last week's ugly
XFS corruption episode, I decided to follow the trend among some Debian people, and installed
ion3.
My impression so far, with two and a half days of usage? I LOVE IT. It is the only WM I've met that really comes from a different point of view, stating that what most so-called modern WMs offer is just counter-productive. It just stays out of your way, not providing any visual distractions, and limiting to providing screens and frames to organize your windows. It acknowledges that its target audience (in my life I'd never set up ion3 for my mother ;-) ) usually hates using the mouse if unneeded, and that there is little point in wasting screen real estate with docks and desktops with functionality. It just sits there waiting for you to command its working via the keyboard - of course, the mouse is also an option, but not the natural one.
Anyway, I won't discuss the beauty of ion3 here - mostly because I have only scratched the surface so far. I have loved it, let me tell you. A little more on this in a couple of lines... Just for my Spanish-prefering friends, I found this piece of text explaining what ion3 is about:
Ion3: Rompiendo con los entornos gr ficos convencionales
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My only grudge is that in its default configuration, ion3 becomes the 0wn3r of Meta. What is Meta? What some people call "the Alt key". That key that is not Ctrl, but has become a controlling key. And I'm a heavy Meta user - Remember that my favorite way of interacting with the computer is Emacs. Yup, the nice OS without a decent editor, nicknamed after "Escape-Meta-Alt-Ctrl-Shift". Rob me of my Meta, and the gained productivity might as well go down the drain.
Here comes the link to my first paragraph: Ion3 is very configurable. No, it's not configurable - it's programmable. The configuration files are pieces of
Lua, a full programming language. Of course, this means you
can do mostly anything with it... But you
have to do it in the end. Editing ion3's behaviour is not just clicking on selectors - You can
take a dive to get the feeling. It looks quite easy, but I yet have to get around it and start poking the configuration.
After mourning my lack of Meta, I came across
a very useful post in Gregor Hermann's blog. Gregor, I owe you a beer or three - You not only gave me back my productivity, you also gave use to the most despised key in my keyboard. Two lines into XModmap, one line into a couple of Ion3 files (I have yet to be sure it is needed in all of them), and I now have a perfectly useful CapsLock key, which is the key I will manage my WM with. It just rocks! It stands in nobody's way, and I am sure I'll very soon grow used to it.
Obviously the last time someone wanted to repaint/paper they decided to
cut down on the amount of work they had to do...