Ion2 window manager

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2005

Recently, I’ve been giving the Ion2 window manager a try. Ion2 is a window manager with a twist. Window managers like it are sometimes refered to as tiling window managers.

Instead of the normal ‘floating’ windows, Ion2 tries to give each window as much screen space as possible. Normally, this would mean all windows are automatically made fullscreen, but it is very easy to split the screen in horizontal or vertical spaces. These divisions are called ‘frames’. Each frame, in turn, can contain multiple completely overlapping windows. They are somewhat comparable to tabs.

Ion2 takes a little time to get used to and, to be honoust, it’s somewhat elitist. Everything (except dragging and resizing of frames) is controlled by keyboard which sometimes becomes a bit tiresome.

Even though the concept of tiling window managers appeals very much to me, there’s a lot that’s wrong with Ion2:

• Horrible documentation.
  It took me quite some time to figure out the keybindings and how to configure Ion2. For instance, I couldn’t even find out how to name the configuration files. The fact that the default configuration files aren’t transfered to ~/.ion2 on startup and that they reside in /etc/X11/ion2 also weren’t a big help. Neither was the fact that documentation for ion1, ion2 en ion3 where completely mixed together (or at least, so it seemed to me).

• Various bugs plagued my use of Ion2.
  Some examples:

  I couldn’t use the Windows key instead of alt as the default command-key because, for some reason, it would notify applications of the keypress too. So pressing Win+s would transfer the ‘s’ character to the application.

  Some applications frequently lost focus when switching desktops. This was mostly noticed with FireFox.

  Resizing events sometimes didn’t propegate to the client windows correctly, leaving, for instance, Vim at a small height.

  I actually suspect that Ion2 is not at fault here but rather the client applications. Perhaps they weren’t honouring standards enough, I don’t know. I do know it rendered Ion2 useless for my needs: Non-Irritating Window Management.

• Very user unfriendly.
  Take for example the fact that to create a ‘floating’ virtual desktop (one in which tiling is not used), I had to press F9 after which I got a prompt saying something like: Window type: [WMIonframeST]: after which I then had to enter something like: WMIonFloatST. Not very user friendly at all.

All in all, Ion2 is a pretty decent window manager. It goes through great lengths to get things right. Pop-up dialogs, for example, are shown in much the same way as FireFox shows it’s search bar and pop-up notification bars. Very intuitive and handy.

Unfortunatelly the ‘bugs’ mentioned above are too annoying for me to work with Ion2 on a daily basis.

There are plenty of other tiling window managers around like ratpoison (whom’s usage I still haven’t figure out after about 2 hours of trying), WMI(I) (which suffered from the same problems af ratpoison) and LarsWM (Haven’t tried it yet).

Now, I haven’t yet given up on Tiling window managers, but it does seem that Doing Things Differently causes a variety of problems that need to be delt with. As soon as they are, I think I’ll switch to Ion. Perhaps Ion3 (currently in development) will bring me joy and happiness on my desktop.

Until then I’m staying with my faithfull little Window Maker desktop which stands undefeated at the top of my list in spite of me having tested over 30 different window managers so far.