window maker menus

A tip about menus in Window Maker, from the Window Maker Guided Tour:

"Menus can be forced to remain open on the workspace by left-clicking the titlebar. This creates a close button on the titlebar."


For example, here's my root menu, with the close button showing:

You can force a submenu to remain open:

And you can move menus and submenus around on the desktop, keeping certain ones open for your convenience:

Another tip:

"The keyboard can be used to open and move through some of the menus. For instance, the root menu can be opened using F12 (default setting). The Up and Down arrow keys can then be used to navigate through the menu or the Left and Right arrow keys to jump between parent menus and submenus. Hitting the Enter key executes the selected item. the Escape key closes the menu or stops menu traversal."


For more info, see http://windowmaker.org/guidedtour/menu.html

trying window maker

I've read about the Window Maker X11 window manager, and I've looked at screenshots, but I didn't think it was something I'd like. Besides, I've been very happy using Openbox and Fluxbox, and I've enjoyed using other WMs as well. But I had nothing better to do yesterday (or, nothing else that I really felt like doing!), so... I installed Window Maker in Bridge Linux, from the Arch repos.

Out of the box, Window Maker looked something like this, except for the icon down at the bottom-left, which is for a running instance of xfce4-screenshooter:

It's very important to read the Window Maker documentation over at windowmaker.org if you want to understand how to use this thing. Not surprisingly, the Arch Wiki also has good info about it (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Window_Maker); and, there's lots of other info out there on the internet, as well.

Window Maker comes with nice GUI tools for configuring everything -- the menu, themes, styles, and so forth -- and there are tons of dock apps that you can choose from to add.

I'm finding that I like Window Maker much more than I was expecting to. Here's how my desktop and menu looked after I set things up a bit:

Very nice WM -- definitely worth taking the time to learn to use.