[dwm] What happened here?

I've spent a lot of time with awesome in the past months, since it
had, at the time, a sensible tiling system and some of the features I
wanted that dwm lacked. Unfortunately, with the progression to the
latest major revision, lua integration has ruined its usability. And
so I came back to poke around at the dwm project and see if it had
progressed into something usable for me.

All I can say is: Yikes.

Specify commands as a list of argument strings?
I don't even recognize the key array as C code ... {.v = dmenucmd} },
... (??)
Tagmasks? Why are we forcing the user to do this in binary?

The website lists clarity as a feature. Clarity!
As for only having to learn C code to edit the config, I know C
reasonably well, but I get bad vibes from config.h, I think I'd rather
try to learn Lua.

I understand that a core tenet of the suckless development is
efficiency.. but it seems to me that at some point between 3.x and 5.3
this usurped usability in its entirety. The concept of "the header
file is the config file" has appeared to outlive it's sensibility.
Let's face it, a C header was never meant to be a scalable
configuration file for something as flexible as a tagging, tiling
window manager.

Anyway. I don't mean to start a huge fuss, just wanted to make an
observation as a previous user, and maybe encourage taking a step back
and looking at the sensibility of how the whole program hangs together
now, for the user. Because, to me, dwm was primarily about getting the
window manager out of my way, but looking at the most recent config.h,
I can tell it won't fit that bill for me anymore.

Sadly going back to the tiling wm dole,

Andrew
Received on Tue Jan 20 2009 - 01:44:30 UTC