I just spent a couple hours playing around with herbstluftwm for the first time. It took me a little while to get going with it, but man is it cool. Super stripped down and fast. I didn’t think anything would tempt me away from i3, but now I don’t know. Is anybody here using it on the daily?
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I have used it, but I like bspwm better, but only because I am more familiar with it’s configs. I used to have ArcoLinux Xtended installed, the ISO with just WM’s, with Xmonad, herbs, i3, qtile, bspwm, and Awesome. It’s a great ISO for getting familiar with them, but holy hell, they pile on keybindings for apps like Variety, the wallpaper app, which had like 9 keybindings, plus keys for nitrogen, and two other wallpaper apps that came with that ISO. To waste that many on wallpaper app in a tiling WM ISO is why I don’t use it anymore, because although you can load 13 different desktops with their Tweak Tool and not have it break anywhere, the WM’s all look and function similarly, all of which have some ugly choices for wallpaper lol.
Their Openbox iteration is pretty cool. The tiling WMs all share the polybar config, and there were times I forgot which WM I was in because the theming is that harmonious , and Erik Duboius really loves his Sardi icons. But if I had to chose only one tiling WM…Awesome is that WM. I saw a desktop today that confirmed how I want to use one, on a DAW based build. I just can’t get it to work yet lol.
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I’ve tried it but I prefer dynamic tiling window managers. I find the DWM, Dmenu & ST combinations are the lightest and smoothest to use. Each needs at least one patch but they fit together nicely. I also do a little manual configuration to the config.def.h files for colours etc and you have to add in a status section to the bar in DWM (there are multiple suggestions on the suckless website). I also have bspwm on another computer and that is very good but requires an external status bar. Polybar works perfectly with it.
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used it for approx year and a half before I stepped over to bspwm. Hlwm is super great - I miss the frames sometimes - but all in all I’m happy with my choice. Also the the save load layout is a nice feature in hlwm
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