I use dwm in my laptop, but previously used i3wm for a few years. I’m curious about:

  • How well EXWM performs nowadays?
  • Is it resource heavy compared to other tiling window managers?
  • Is it still an issue EXWM not being multi-threaded?

My daily tasks involves just opening chrome, telegram and/or slack, watching movies and coding of course. Would it be a good fit for my needs?

I’d love to know your thoughts if you use or have some previous experience with EXWM. Thank you in advance!

  • ftrx@alien.topBEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    How well EXWM performs nowadays?

    IME the same of yesterday, I mean it’s a WM, no special compiz/beryll alike effects or so…

    Is it resource heavy compared to other tiling window managers?

    EXWM run on top of Emacs, so definitively it demand more resources than an X standalone WM, but itself it’s very light. The point of EXWM is living in Emacs, it’s a nonsense choosing it for just the WM.

    Is it still an issue EXWM not being multi-threaded?

    Generally speaking yes, but no. Normally you have to do nothing blocking so there is no issue. RARELY I experience something but it’s honestly not a problem and the ability to have my X11 stuff in Emacs it’s so much powerful that I do not want to switch to anything else…

  • unix_hacker@alien.topBEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I used EXWM for years and it was great. No real performance issues, and rarely did its single threaded nature cause a problem.

    But I ended up switching to StumpWM because I prefer running a single Emacs instance that I can restart without restarting my whole window manager. And StumpWM can still be controlled in Emacs via SLY.

    But it’s not nearly as intuitive as Emacs, as it acts more like tmux than an extension of Emacs window management.

  • klyone@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I use EXWM daily and I think it is the best user experience without needing the mouse. I have tested i3 in the past but I feel it limited at some points… Anyway, I agree that it is a personal choice and you should give a try!

  • LionyxML@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Also curious, does it still hangs with ‘M-x gnus’ or any other time consuming command?

    • Lucky-Pressure@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Yes, you have to wait for it to be finished to move on. Mostly won’t take that long though. The pros outweigh this con for me in daily use. You can break with C-g if it takes too long.

      • RichieHHam@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        What are the pros that outweigh a single threaded DM? I love Emacs but something like sway on Wayland is a joy on modern HW.

  • franburstall@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I have been using it as my daily driver for years. i3 comes close but the shear emacsiness of the exwm experience is impossible to beat. I don’t run very long jobs in elisp and so the single-threaded issue has not bitten me. Your task spec seems similar to mine and so it should be a good fit. Give it a go!

  • rfeynman42@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been daily driving EXWM for about 3 years now and I love it. I haven’t noticed any performance problems and it should work great for just opening the apps you listed.

    EXWM being single-threaded (and just being in Emacs) is still somewhat of an issue in that if you’re toying with Emacs and accidentally freeze or crash it, everything else goes down with the ship. It’s not that often of a problem in my experience and I personally find the benefits of EXWM totally outweigh this problem.

    • FreeAd7233@alien.topBEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Do you think if it is okay to open 2 emacs simultaneously (one with EXWM and one that runs within the EXWM)?

      What I mean is that if it will bring a lot of headaches, say, key bindings conflicts?

        • rfeynman42@alien.topBEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Seconded (also you can use C-c C-k to quickly do this!). I’ve debugged Emacs startup errors and segfaults from within EXWM many times this way!

  • sleekelite@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    why don’t you just try it and see if you personally like it for your personal tasks and requirements

  • cosmologica101@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I loved it. If I don’t need to be on a MS Windows machine, I would use EXWM as my daily driver. On Linux it was without problems. Yes, make keybindings and functions for sound, brightness and applications I want to start was a little bit of work. A little bit work with the configuration of X, like the mouse pointer, etc…

  • J-ky@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I have been using exwm for about 2 years, there are some weirdness. When it comes to switching buffer preview with consult, the minibuffer loses focus when in a firefox buffer. And the support for wine application is utterly garbage, sometimes, I cannot even type in the wine application. In my dual monitors setup, I have to do some workaround to switch between monitor easily.

    I have been trying other keyboard-centric window managers, like i3, dwm, stumpwm. None of them even come close to the integration of Emacs by exwm.

    If I have time, I may try to fix the above issues myself, since the exwm has been abandoned by the author for quite some years, and the current maintainer kindly took over to accept pull request.

  • johan_widen@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I agree that EXWM is in general a very pleasant experience, I used it for several years. But I have now given up on it and switched to sway. The issue was apps that created floating windows, I never got that to work smoothly. Just saving a file to disk in the web browser was a pain.

  • MinallWch@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    It is a great WM, the only really downside is the single threaded bit, which you can fix by opening another instance of emacs and passing keycaps directly, so that you run any processes that you know will block you in any time, in the created instance, this with emacs server is all you need.