Lillesvin Networks

Musca has gone mostly unnoticed among the myriad of tiling window managers available out there, but how is beyond me. This is truly a window manager that will go out of its way to get out of your way. Unlike a lot of the other tiling window managers out there, Musca does the tiling manually – that is, you do the tiling. After fighting with Awesome and its unflexible dynamic tiling, and trying to cope with the convoluted and emacsy key bindings of Ratpoison, I finally stumbled upon Musca, and decided to compile/install it even though there’s no Ubuntu package readily available. (Yeah, I’m lazy like that.) I only wish I’d done that sooner, because that is one hell of a window manager! Screenshot time.

One of my problems with Awesome was that I could only switch between a few preset layouts, and those didn’t give me much control of the frame sizes. I actually do want my VIM to be exactly 80 characters wide – no more, no less – and Awesome didn’t give me that option. Ratpoison did, but I don’t like having to hit Ctrl-c t just to launch a terminal, when Mod4-t or Mod4-Enter will do. Those key combo chains have never been my cup of tea, which is why I’m using VIM and not Emacs.

Actually, before I even started looking at tiling window managers, I was using EvilWM, which is absolutely great, but I was getting tired of having to organize my windows manually on every login. Musca can be scripted to do pretty much everything – there are of course bugs and I don’t even know if it’s in development any longer, but it’s so goooood and sexy.