March 31, 2009 - StumpWM on my Eee PC

I have something announce that may be shocking to some people: I can be very geeky when it comes to my computer. Ok, so obviously that’s a poor attempt at humor, but it is true.

I usually run Gnome on my main laptop for various reasons. Besides appreciating the look, feel, and behavior of the GTK+ kit over Qt (a personal preference), I’ve grown fond of Gnome’s usability. Beyond that, it’s often times helpful to have the notification bar available since I usually have around 15 open over six virtual desktops (about half to two-thirds of which are XTerm windows). Besides, I sometimes have to show various apps and information to people who are used to seeing an environment that looks at least somewhat familiar, and so Gnome tends to work out nicely.

But, being a huge fan and constant user of GNU Emacs, my fingers have built up quite a bit of muscle memory for things like “C-x 5 2”, “M-q”, or “C-space C-q C-y” (“Ctrl-x, 5, 2”, “Alt+q”, and “a way to cut and paste” for the Windows people out there). So much that I often find myself typing C-x C-s (save file) or C-_ (undo) inside of just about every other editor and app without even thinking. So having a desktop environment that shares these keybindings would be very helpful.

A few years ago I came across such an environment called ratpoison, which provided an extremely minimal GUI environment. How minimal? Windows did not overlap, had no boarders, had no title bars, and the whole thing was set up to work entirely from keyboard commands. A cool concept, but was it usable? To find out I took it for a test drive for an entire day, using nothing but ratpoison. It turned out that it was quite usable, but at the time I was not an Emacs user and so I had a lot of problems getting used to the keyboard shortcuts (I think… all that was a while ago).

Another window manager, StumpWM, is basically the same thing as ratpoison (written by the same author, too). However, it’s written using my favorite programming language, Common Lisp, has more features, and is a bit more customizable. I actually did the same sort of experiment with it as I did with ratpoison, eventually arriving at the conclusion that StumpWM was absolutely awesome and worthy of being installed with all my other regular apps.

So as I said, I’m a computer geek, a fact that purchasing an Eee PC did not help. Since buying my second one, I’ve successfully removed the modified Xandros Linux that came with it, installed Slackware 12.1, upgraded to Slackware 12.2, installed SBCL 1.0.24 from source¹, and as of tonight, installed StumpWM from source.

StumpWM runs incredibly smooth on it, and my other apps seem to benefit from the extra resources that usually aren’t available to them. The biggest drawback so far is that my Eee’s screen size is 1024x600, (1022x564 in StumpWM once you account for the infobar I have up top). This means that tiling is somewhat limited unless I connect to a larger monitor, preferably one that is not widescreen. Splitting the screen horizontally helps some, but not with browsing.

I’m going to keep this as my default GUI for a while on my Eee PC to see how it works out. Since my Eee is mostly used for surfing the web, talking to people, playing music, and occasionally an SSH session, I should have no problems whatsoever.