Rensselaer Center for Open Source Software

Is it really lightweight?

One of the things I have been thinking about lately is what exactly does lightweight mean? Which one of my goals is to keep fenestra lightweight. Does it mean a simplistic, easy to use design? Or does it also mean light system resources? Or does it even mean a simplistic codebase that is easy to understand and build upon? I have been trying to keep all three of those points in my mind when coding fenestra. Perhaps my ultimate goal when making a lightweight window manager is to have it so simple to use, that even a child could learn it and use it, even without the use of the mouse. I recently read a blog of someone who was teaching his two kids Linux, and up until recently he never showed them a GUI, preferring to teach them using the command line only. And when he finally decided to show them a GUI, he chose xmonad as the window manager, xmonad being a tiling window manager like fenestra. He chose xmonad because it was a window manager in the purest form, it has no file manager, it has no desktop environment, it's simply a window manager.

I guess that's what I really mean by lightweight, a simple and usable tool that gets the job done every time. Any extra bells or whistles are unnecessary to me or even just another distraction to my workflow. If all I want to do is open up a text editor, a terminal and web browser for documentation, fenestra can easily do that in the most efficient way possible and without your fingers ever leaving the keyboard.