 Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel today. I'm going to be talking about left WM now a month ago or so I made a video about this it's claiming that I was going to switch full-time and And I'll be honest with you. I did not switch full-time. I tried I stayed on it for about three days and I Just didn't care for it. So I've been using off and on now for a month Every time I think about making this video I just said I'm gonna go back and use it for a little while And I always end up going back to my lovely DWM and being happy there for a little while and then coming back and being miserable And left WM and there are a few reasons why I'm miserable and miserable is the wrong way wrong thing to say Love WM is fine. It's just not for me. And I'm gonna talk about the reasons why it's not for me that Today and before I do I just want to say I know the camera is horrible I'm not sure what the hell is going on. I look like a ghost. I'm pretty sure I'm not this pale in real life I mean, I know I shaved the the neck beard off, but It's a I'm definitely not this pasty white. I Don't know what the hell is going on. I mean I need a new camera desperately. Anyways, let's go ahead and jump in And talk about left WM So this is what my left WM looks like right now. Now. This is my second install left WM I had to uninstall it because I corrupted it in some way I'm not exactly sure I messed up the configuration file in some way even replacing the configuration file wouldn't fix it So it just wouldn't load So I had to reinstall it and this is actually just the default Dracula rounded theme that you can download off the internet. I'm not done very much customization to it at all and If you know me You know that that's very unusual because when I get into a new window manager I highly enjoy racing it as long as I can figure out how to do so And I did figure out how to rice and change in theme left WM It's just that after I lost my rice before I didn't really feel like going through and doing it again So the way left WM does things is that it's based around a set of themes So if I actually go ahead and quit out of this we can go through and Go up a level. This is the themes folder and right now I just have this one theme But there are other themes that you can download and basically what you do Is that each of these themes have a couple scripts and one of them is the up script now? This right here is my first big problem with left WM Anything that you want to auto start has to be in that up script So if you want to have something like x clip or clip menu d Or xx hkd, whatever if you want to have any of those things auto start you have to have them in your upflot your up script The problem comes in is that every single theme you have has its own up script. They're completely separate So you'd have to go through and edit every single up script in order to get your Programs up and running, you know in an auto start way. There's no separate auto start file at least as far as I could find and that's a huge thing because I don't If your idea is to have a window manager that's based around themes You don't want to have to go through and edit each theme to do the regular computing stuff like having an auto start file or doing the Keybindings like I mean the key bindings are separate from this. So why isn't there a separate auto start file? I can't understand the reasoning behind that But more with this up file. So if I've been into the up file thing again if you see if you edit this thing because everything here is in an if then statement or some kind of if statement Because of that if you edit things in the wrong way If you edit thing if you put something in here that is in the wrong order Or if you you know make any kind of mistakes Left wm just completely fails to work. I can't get over the fact that If you mess this up script that it left wm just becomes unusable and also I can't get over the fact that There's not an easier way just if I go through And cd and show you my i3 auto start script, right? So I can just do cd.dwm Auto start and then them out into my auto start thing from my dwm. This is what my auto start file for dwm looks like. There's no if then statements not really It's just a list of things that it's going to start at the beginning This is what an auto start file really should look like and there's no problems with the way A Left wm really does it. It's just that it complicates things Kind of unnecessarily because some of the stuff in there is duplicate Every theme that they have right now calls pika every single one of them Every single one of them calls Dunst, okay, so those things are redundant in every single up script Why not have a separate auto start file where those things are just living And then call the specific theme needed things in an up script That would make ton more sense to me and it would allow you to go through and edit the auto start file So that you don't have to you know Mess around with those up scripts and potentially make a mistake So that was my first problem When I first installed left wm, I actually couldn't get the up script to run at startup I had to actually go through and Go go into This file here And create a dot desktop entry For that up script in order to get to work now the second time that I've installed left wm It actually went through and did it fine. I don't know what I did wrong the first time I think I messed around with that left wm-themed thing that they have It's some kind of auto thaming thing. I really don't understand it So the second time has done fine the up so the up script was One of the my was my probably my biggest problem with left wm is just because the auto start Script or auto start file that I always have is something that's really important to the way I do my computing Because I have certain things that always have to start like I just showed you the script that I have for dwm I always have clip menu. I always have mpd You know, I always have dunce. I always have sxh kd because a lot of my key binding and stuff are in sxh kd and I like having That one sxh kd file, which I can take with me to whatever window manager I'm in and I can't do that here because Every time I tried to add sxh kd to the up script things went wrong, you know, either the script went run or left wm went star or You know, something was always going wrong and now some of that is going to be my inability to Understand what was going on in the up script because you have to have things in a certain order and it You know, it's just overly complicated so I'm 100% willing to admit that most of my problems with the up thing is One laziness and that I don't want to have to go through and edit every single up script of everything Every single theme that I use in order to start the programs that I want to have started and second my inability to actually understand The necessary order of things in that script I'm like, I'm not sure why things have to go in that order like for example Polybar has to for whatever reason be at the end of that script always Right, you can't start that at the beginning now I understand that the reason why is because polybar is a something that's consistently running in the background, right? so um I really can't show you this but if you if you notice that that File that I was on before every single entry had an and after it Polybar can't really have that and at at the end. So it's I I might be completely wrong with I don't know I don't even know. I just know that the poly bar thing has to be at the end So the up thing was In the auto start problems were was my first big problem. The second one is multi monitor support. So I have two monitors. I have two 27 inch monitors in front of me and I desperately need a third one But I don't have room for it. So I suspect that's one of the reasons why I have a burning need to have more than nine workspaces and I'm not even sure if left WM can handle more than nine workspaces. I didn't try I was trying to Get into not using so many workspaces when I was in this one, but you know, whatever My biggest problem is that because I use so many workspaces and I switch between the monitors so often Because like right now I have the terminals on you know screen one and I have obs and audacity on another workspace And if I switch, you know between them, this is six and I think this was four three You know, I switch between them and left WM is very much like q-tile in that the nine workspaces are shared between them and if you switch between Six and four they actually switch between monitors and that's fine. I got used to that in q-tile I could get used to it and left left WM. It's not a big deal. It's something that you just have to get used to It's not like it's it's not a big deal. My biggest problem is that there doesn't seem to be a way to move applications from one tag or Workspace or whatever they call I think you call them tags in left WM There's no way to move them from one tag That's on one monitor to the tag on another the other monitor without actually just moving them to a different tag so right right now I have A workspace four and workspace six up. I couldn't move The things that are on workspace six to workspace four Without them switching I couldn't move. Okay, so this is really this is very complicated what I want to do I what I want to do is keep both six and four on the same monitors and move the applications between them now What I could do is just do mod shift four and that would move The application to that Workspace but in every other window manager, there's a way to move Things between workspaces. So if I wanted just to move modacity back over to Workspace six I could just do in say like DWM or something I could just do super shift and then either the arrow keys or the vim keys And you can't do that in left WM. You just have to go super shift six and that takes it back to where you know It was before But that's kind of annoying because I just would much rather just use the key bindings. I'm used to And normally what you'd do is say You know just go through and in the command or in the uh config file Which is this here Just create a key binding for that The problem is that the callouts to to move to An application from one monitor to the other don't exist as far as I can tell now I've been through their their documentation. There doesn't seem to be anything there that moves from one monitor to the other There also doesn't seem to be a way to move focus between one monitor and the other so That's the uh The moving thing is there's a workaround right so you I could go through and just move them to whatever tag is Active on that monitor so right now workspace three and workspace six are active if I wanted to move things around I could just move them around using mod shift Works three and six, you know that would work But moving focus is actually much different because I want if I don't want to use my mouse to actually move focus And I just want to move focus from Three to six, but I want to keep the monitors exactly the same. There doesn't appear to be a way to do that now there's a Key binding mod w which will allow you to change the focus to the last Workspace you are on and that kind of works It's kind of a hacky way of doing it But it's not really because if your last workspace was also on the same monitor That's the one you changed to not the monitor that's over here. I just want to change focus I don't want to go through and change Uh, the where the monitor the layout of the apps on the monitors right now I just want to change focus from monitor one to monitor two and there doesn't seem to be a way of doing that Now in every other window manager, there is xmonad has it q tile has it i3 has it dwm has it It's a basic functionality that you need if you're going to support multiple monitors So now I'm going to just put this out there left wm as a new Ciling window manager hasn't been around for all that long. I don't think yeah, so it's only a couple years old It's hasn't been around for very long And that's a thing, you know, that's not a huge deal not everyone has multiple monitors There maybe the developers don't have multiple multiple monitors themselves. So this is not necessary So maybe like I said, maybe the developers don't have multiple monitors Maybe it's just something that hasn't been a focus for them and that's not a big deal There's a ton of window managers out there that don't even have Any multiple monitor support at all like franken wm doesn't support multiple monitors at all You just have one gigantic thing that's spread across both your monitors and that's how it works It's just completely unusable and that's just the way it is because it's a it's a small project And that's what left wm is the fact that it supports it even as much as it does is really good It's not right and it's not you know the way you should do it, but the fact that it's as good as it is is respectable so Those are my two biggest scrubs with left wm It reminds me a lot of q-tile in terms of the way things are laid out and the way things move around And I got used to q-tile using it for quite a while about a year ago So I was you know, I enjoy q-tile and I could find myself enjoying left wm at times But the the inability to focus between monitors is a huge deal because I switch between monitors all the time and I Don't want to grab my mouse and switch it all over to the other monitor in order to change the focus Now I could just go through and switch them, you know The workspaces so that the workspace of the other monitors not on the main monitor That's what I ended up doing and that's not that's not really that Removes the greatness of having two monitors, you know because that means I'm always focused on this monitor I might as well just only have one monitor So that's The focus thing was really truly the biggest problem I had with left wm and the Focusing was really the biggest problem I had and it was the biggest reason why I Couldn't stay in left wm full-time when I said I was going to a month ago The up script thing and the auto start You know the way it does auto start Was kind of a minor thing because really that was just laziness I didn't want to go through I wanted the ability to change themes right and the ability to create my own themes And what really what that would mean is going through and editing each of those up scripts in order to properly work and The amount of times I went through and made a you know error in one of those and corrupted the theme It has to number more than Five and that's not okay. That's just not a great thing. I wish if I'm going to create a theme You know, I don't want to have to go through and you know Making mistakes is is part of the process But it just seemed too hard especially for when I just wanted to go through and you know Make sure that every single theme would automatically start, you know Clip menu or and start uh, you know My bookmarks script You know, those are the things that I want. You just want start, you know Want to start at the beginning or at the at the start up and There's a way to do that, but it's overly complicated. So those are my thoughts on left wm I'm going to uninstall it now I'm not going to there's no reason for me to keep it installed. I'm never going to use it again You know, maybe I'll check it out like a year and a half or two or years or something like that and see if it's, you know made any progress, but My thoughts on it are really that it's If you just have one monitor and you're not going to be switching themes all the time Left wm is great. I mean, it's fast. It's fluid, you know, it's highly customizable for the most part um I mean, obviously there are exceptions, but It's just really good But it's those Pain points are those two things that I talked about that would just not make it for me So when so back at the beginning of the video, I said I was miserable in left wm and And I said that that wasn't really the right word and mostly what it is is left wm is just not for me And that's a shame because it's you know, it's kind of good Uh, it it is it's kind of good. It's just Like I said, there's just two things for me and I can't use it. So anyways, thanks for watching You can follow us on twitter at the linux cast you can follow on facebook at At the linux cast you can also support us on patreon at patreon.com Slash linux cast and with that in mind, I'd like to take a moment to thank our current patrons Devon marcus maklin donnie brand new patron. Thank you for support Merrick camp michael. Thanks everybody for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time