Kahakai rocks!

NuclearFusi0n · Apprentice Joined: 20 Jun 2003 Posts: 297

http://kahakai.sf.net

This window manager is absolutely amazing. It's like fluxbox done right! It's was forked from waimea a while ago, and has evolved quite a bit to create an incredible window manager.

Here are some of the features that I couldn't live without:

I'm personally running with a 2 x 2 viewport grid. If you aren't familiar with viewports, just imagine 4 screens in a 2 x 2 grid, and your screen displays whatever viewports your mouse is in. If I move my mouse to the right, I'll snap into a new viewport, same as if I move down or both down and right.

It's like 4 monitors in one for me.

Productivity++ You can configure the number of viewports as you see fit, and you can even use viewport knock, which will make viewports switch only when you click on a screen edge.

Screenshots - mine is listed 4th down with a customized Default 0.2 theme.

I hope some of you will give it a try - it's fairly small so it doesn't take much to compile and check it out.

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charlieg · Posted: Thu Sep 04, 2003 8:23 am Post subject:

Yeah, Kahakai has made rapid progress and it's great to see the mantle of Waimea development being taken over in this fork.

Waimea was excellent; well featured and efficient. But it was a little raw... Kahakai has made a lot of excellent progress and added some great new features.

I do hope that a release or 2 gets dedicated to keeping the footprint low and working on wm speed. My only concern with Kahakai is that it gets a little slower than the average *box, just enough to make people use it as a negative against Kahakai.
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princeofchaos · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 11 Jun 2003 Posts: 107

I've been meaning to get to improving Kahakai's performance for some time.

The biggest issue is the scripting support which means we can never be as light (<1MB memory usage) as some *boxes are.

Roguelazer · Posted: Thu Sep 04, 2003 3:35 pm Post subject:

Khakai is great, but why are there no styles downloadable! I followed the instructions for cvs styles checkout but it says

dabtech · n00b Joined: 25 May 2003 Posts: 63 Location: Chicago

Kahakai is very nice! It truly is the best features of Waimea and Flux. The syntax of the style files is very nice and the python extensibility is awesome. The developers are doing a great job.

nucleafusi0n:

What monitoring app/theme are you running on your screenshot?

NuclearFusi0n · Apprentice Joined: 20 Jun 2003 Posts: 297

Chickpea · l33t Joined: 03 Jun 2002 Posts: 846 Location: Vancouver WA

I am downloading the lastest right now. I am really looking forward to all kahakai has to offer.

right now I am at a cross between fvwm and the *box style wm. I like what fvwm has to offer it just seems so hard to figure out the config files

Kahakai is very easy to setup and looks to be very customizable.

Princeofchaos: are you using a gnome-panel? or using kahaki inside of gnome?

princeofchaos · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 11 Jun 2003 Posts: 107

I'm using gnome-panel launched from ~/.kahakai/autostart file.

About the style format, are you talking about the old style format or the new style format? :-)

dain-bramage · n00b Joined: 11 Jul 2003 Posts: 25

You should try Enlightenment. Small and very fast. I've heard people have had problems with crashes, but I've had it on two machines for over 3 months and haven't had a crash yet.

Menu driven, no start menu or task bar and the most customizable gui I have used.

And it has no crap installed with it, I think it's only around 10Mb altogether.

princeofchaos · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 11 Jun 2003 Posts: 107

Kahakai is much more customizable than E, because you have scripting embedded (E AFAIK doesn't). E probably wins in eyecandy department, but the only thing comparable in terms of easy scripting is Sawfish.

Kahakai 0.4.1 tarball is 400K, a third less than previous releases. And third of that is the wallpaper.

Chickpea · l33t Joined: 03 Jun 2002 Posts: 846 Location: Vancouver WA

princeofchaos · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 11 Jun 2003 Posts: 107

The question about style format was for dabtech (see earlier message) :-)

dabtech · n00b Joined: 25 May 2003 Posts: 63 Location: Chicago

I'm referring to the new style format of course! :wink:

mackstann · n00b Joined: 12 Jun 2003 Posts: 50 Location: Iowa, US

MechanicalTurk · Posted: Sat Sep 06, 2003 10:22 am Post subject: Can't wait

I'm emerging kahakai as I speak (well, post). I used to use a litestep shell when I was using Win9x at the start of this year. When I decided to install Linux, I originally tried Mandrake, but I really couldn't handle the default windows manager for it. I eventually chose fluxbox b/c it's a lightweight w/m, and I was using a blackbox theme in litestep, but I really missed the customisability of litestep.

From the sounds of it Kahakai might be just what I'm after. Right.... It's documentation reading time

princeofchaos · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 11 Jun 2003 Posts: 107

Documentation is still somewhat lacking, but we have excellent support at channel #kahakai on irc.freenode.net. At least one of the developers (usually more) is there.

MechanicalTurk · Posted: Sun Sep 07, 2003 11:29 am Post subject: Yay!

Hooray for Kahakai.
I like this a lot. Viewports => Best feature I've seen in a wm in a long while. Hell, it's even gotten me to use X most of the time now instead of my bootsplashed console framebuffer. I just love the way I can have a movie running full screen, and then pause it, surf viewports to another screen, do something there, flick my mouse back, and resume watching my movie. Definately beats using multiple desktops in flux. (Though you can do that in kahakai too.) Plus the ability to have a terminal pop up when you double click you're background is very cool.

MechanicalTurk<=Converted

solatis · Posted: Sun Sep 07, 2003 7:47 pm Post subject:

Yeah, Kahakai really is good... low-level scripting support and such.

However, and I know Kahakai needs to be more "stable" in order to archieve this, I do find it a pity that Kahakai has so little documentation. The IRC channel (#kahakai on freenode) *IS* very responsive and nice, however, it does take a lot of guts to bother them with everything...

Anyway, I know that the progress and new features added/changed prohobits a good documentation, so it's probably just a matter of time...
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charlieg · Posted: Sun Sep 07, 2003 8:55 pm Post subject: Re: Yay!

maxmc · Posted: Sun Sep 07, 2003 11:54 pm Post subject:

Maybe it was ion. Which I'd recommend to anyone.

Word Mofo · n00b Joined: 31 Jul 2002 Posts: 17

How do viewports work? I can't figure this out

maxmc · Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2003 3:48 am Post subject:

princeofchaos · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 11 Jun 2003 Posts: 107

I wouldn't say those are viewports. Definitely not. Only one viewport is visible at a time in most WMs and it's like scrolling a window around one huge desktop.

So if you have a 2x2 grid and you can have a really big window that has its left third in the upper left viewport, right two thirds in upper right viewport.

You can either switch according to a grid or just scroll around.

P.S. I'm a Emacs user, so I know what window panes are.

solatis · Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2003 7:22 am Post subject:

Indeed. Viewports is rather that you only can see a part of the desktop, while the desktop in fact is a lot large.

Multiple-monitor-desktops is actually some sort of really advanced version of viewports... hmmm, wait, perhaps that isn't a too good example.

Oh well, you get the point

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mackstann · n00b Joined: 12 Jun 2003 Posts: 50 Location: Iowa, US

Desktops are essentially completely seperate screens for windows to be on. If you use viewports, then you have a large desktop which you can then move the viewport around in; it's as if your monitor is a peephole onto a large surface (the desktop). If a window hangs off the bottom of a viewport, it'll hang from the top of the viewport below it.

Also, viewports are capable of 2 dimensions naturally, while desktops are generally a 1 dimensional list (but can be made to act as if they were a 2d grid, depending on the wm).

Documentation is definitely a difficult issue so far, considering that you don't want to spend hours and hours typing, only to have it be worthless in a few weeks. I wrote up a decent blurb in the new userconfig.py (in cvs, not 0.4.1), as well as a redesign of the file (and the underlying stuff that it utilizes), so that should help usability, we just need to iron things out and figure out if we can live with this exact format for a long time. If so, then I am perfectly capable of filling it with paragraphs upon paragraphs of explanations.

If anything, I should make a man page for it. Hm...

Also, today we worked on startup times, and they are now MUCH faster. My circa-0.4.1 install takes almost 3 seconds to start up, while the up-to-date install starts up in one second.