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layout: ../../layouts/BlogLayout.astro
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# DWM - useless gaps are useless!
Many people in Linux community spend too much time *"ricing"* their desktops. Here are few points I came to after using minimal window managers for 2 years:
- Screen real estate **matters**
- Gaps are **useless** (unless you care about your wallpaper)
- Wallpapers draw too much of your **attention**
- You **don't need** to constantly see your CPU temperature, battery percentage etc.
- **Less** windows is **better**
And from that I can derive an advice on how to stay functional, productive and efficient with minimal window managers:
- **Get rid** of gaps
- **Stop** caring about your wallpaper
- **Don't** put many windows on your screen at once. You probably only need one. Two is ok, sometimes three. More windows = less focus
- Try **removing** window borders (or using `1px black` border). You won't be able to see which window is focused this way, and that will naturally encourage you to keep less windows on the screen
- **Decrease** the number of available workspaces / tags
- **Hide** your status bar when you don't need it
Following these steps leads you to super-productive no-distraction fullscreen experience. You still get all the advantages of your window manager though.
**Try it!** (you can always switch back)
# Evolution of my desktop
Here's my journey to my current WM philosophy - represented in random screenshots with a couple of comments.
If you want to replicate a setup on the screenshot - lookup it's date and checkout the corresponding commit of my [dwm build](https://git.eug-vs.xyz/suckless/dwm/).
## i3
I've been happy user of `i3` with a lot of "ricing" for a long time. I liked transparent windows, blur and shadows:
## DWM
But then I decided to switch to suckless `dwm`. The functional approach was so much better then manual window management in i3 - as a perfectionist I always spent extra time arranging windows "in a cool way". DWM solved this problem entirely, but I still couldn't live without beautiful wallpaper and gaps.
## Fuck gaps!
After ~4 months of `dwm` (and ~year of using minimal window managers) I realized - gaps are just taking too much of my screen real estate! Let's try removing them entirely:
As a bonus you stop caring about your nice wallpaper because you only see it once - when you first boot your machine. You can also get rid of your composite manager now. Finally, get rid of that bright orange:
That setup was untouched for 4 months! Finally rollback some patches to get that beautiful default status bar (that color though!):
## Current state
That lived for 3 more months and now I use gray as the accent color and all my borders are black! Also I decreased the number of available tags.
Most of the time I hide status-bar anyway.
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