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Technology/WMs and Email, (sdf.org), 01/17/2019
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I'm a capricious user, especially when it comes to window 
managers. I'll install and use a random new wm (if I can 
find one I haven't tried yet) for no reason at all. Today, 
after discovering that visiting a URL in Firefox, or typing 
this line in an xterm:

echo -e "\xe2\x9b\x93b" | xargs xsetroot -name

killed my running dwm, I decided I was due for some 
experimenting. Something about an almost-stock install of 
dwm just dying because an unwelcome unicode character 
presented itself for display on the "bar" made me irritable. 
I don't want to be wasting time browsing Firefox or 
Thunderbird Themes only to have my computer brusquely return 
me to lightdm without my consent.

But, this isn't a rant about dwm- which is a fine wm if 
you're willing to do the work- this is about what I was 
doing when dwm crashed, and what I found afterward.

Before dmw puked out, I was innocently attempting to use 
Thunderbird as an email client. Every year or so, I bounce 
around between the easy and readily-available clients, to 
remind myself what I didn't like about them. This time I 
setup and used sylpheed, and then Thunderbird. The resource 
usage of Thunderbird seemed absurdly high. I searched out a 
few "fixes" and also gave it time to "settle." This paid 
off, and Thundbird turned out to be a rather feature-rich 
client with relatively low overhead. I know that last 
sentence is wrong, but I'm leaving it there anyway.

Of course, vanilla Thunderbird is rather bright, so 
switching between tiled terminal windows and email was 
jarring. Themes... it has themes. I decided to look at this 
one:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark/?src=search

which brought dwm to its knees. Hey! I'm not here to 
complain about dwm dying, doggone it.

I took a few minutes to search around and figure out why my 
dwm was dying (I'm not going to mention it again, I 
promise) and then decided that it was time to play with wm's 
again. I really can't have a wm that dies if I go to the 
wrong website. Scanned around for anything new, and stumbled 
upon "subtle." I couldn't recall having tried it, so I 
installed it and fired it up.

Coming, most recently, from spectrwm and dwm, I was pleased 
by a few things in subtle (which I used for the afternoon.) 
First, the "gravity" thing is pretty neat. Tiling is manual, 
and you can use W(indows)-numpad to anchor your windows to 
corresponding portions of the screen. I fired up three 
uxterms, anchored one to the full left half of the screen 
with W-4, and the other two to the top/bottom of the right 
half of the screen with W-9 and W-3. Pretty easy and fast, I 
felt. Double pressing a W-numpad combo provided you with a 
few different size options at that anchor point.

Another thing I enjoyed was the "tagging" concept. When you 
fire up a terminal (of whatever type you define) it shows up 
on the "terms" screen; when you fire up a browser, it shows 
up on the "www" screen, and so forth. Basically, you 
configure where you want programs of various types, and they 
go there automatically. This is a little backward in a 
window manager that won't automatically tile, but that's 
beside the point. It was neat to fiddle with.

Presently, I'm back in spectrwm until I can figure out how 
to make dwm bullet proof (I thought it was! But I'm not 
talking about it.) The only thing I miss going from dmw back 
to spectrwm (I learned spectrwm first) is the mouse 
shortcuts to the desktops (or whatever they call them, I 
don't care) that were in the upper-left of my dwm. The 
Bionic distro's 3.1.0 spectrwm doesn't have that. It's nice 
when you're already over at the mouse, to be able to quickly 
swap desktops before returning to the keyboard. I lived 
without it before though, I'm sure I'll be fine. 

And now I've demonstrated how I waste precious time during 
my work day, and I've wasted even more time by hammering my 
thoughts out. At least I knew I was wasting time; half-way 
through my escapade, I took a "break" to work on my 
grandfather's insolvent estate, something that has been a 
little thorn in my side for the past half-year, and which I 
hope to tie off in the near future. If you were me, you'd 
choose the window-manager-email-client-adventure too, rigth?