I use dwm in my laptop, but previously used i3wm for a few years. I’m curious about:
- How well
EXWMperforms nowadays? - Is it resource heavy compared to other tiling window managers?
- Is it still an issue
EXWMnot 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!
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…
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.
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…
Also curious, does it still hangs with ‘M-x gnus’ or any other time consuming command?
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.
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!
