Ion

Jul 20, 2023

Window manager with a text-editorish, keyboard friendly interface

Ion based on PWM is a new kind of window manager that brings a text-editorish, keyboard friendly user interface to window management.

Modern GUIs are unusable. Overlapping windows are hard to manage, especially from the keyboard, and the user often ends up in a jungle. Not to mention the application programs, which are even worse. Mouse-based search-and-click interfaces are slow - keyboard is fast having learnt the commands. Ion the last three letters of vision =- was written as an example and an experiment of something presumably better just the window manager, though.

Ion simply divides the screen into frames that take the whole screen. Big displays have so much space that this is convenient and smaller displays couldn’t show more than one window at a time anyway. The frames can be split and growing the size of one will shrink others. Alike in PWM, clients can be moved between frames and multiple clients can be attached to one frame.

With Ion you will hardly ever have to touch the mouse again for navigation between windows and the windows are always in order.

WWW http//modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/



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