this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Would I recommend EXWM as a daily driver? Not really. I say that as someone who has chosen to use exwm exclusively for years and tens of thousands of hours. I tried I3 for a while, and have used EXWM under OpenSuse several years and now under Guix, almost always with 3 monitors.
I find that exwm is a glass cannon. Like Linux and emacs, it has a learning curve and appeals to those who tolerate or enjoy that. Why do I get huge benefits from exwm?
C-x b
and I can go to any buffer, any app. This is one of the biggest benefits for me, and is absolutely huge.emm-pause
etc. It's not wrong to say that emacs is truly just a good text interface to things, and no where is that highlighted more than in making it your window manager.But as for the "Glass" part of the "glass cannon", there are several concerns that mean that EXWM is not good for general recommendation to, say, my colleagues, or my student developers.
Substantial learning curve. For some of us this is enjoyable, but not for everyone.
Customization needed. For some users (ie Linux users) this is a given, but those deep in Windows, Mac, and even Ubuntu may not have the taste for this.
Threading. Despite those who say otherwise, I have taken the habit of starting sub-emacs processes for the two emacs programs I run that can freeze the main thread. I have shortcuts for my Telega (= superb Telegram front-end) and Elfeed (which freezes on retrieval of some of my RSS feeds). In the past I've also needed to use sub-processes for TRAMP, but I've been able to stop this with 1) better internet connections 2) remembering to actually clean up all tramp connections when I finish using them, so they don't sleep and freeze.
More likely catastrophes. I have lost times when a syntax error in my emacs init file causes things to fail to even boot, when I need to use command-line to debug my emacs init (often imbalanced parenthesis). An even tougher debug was necessary when I switched to GUIX and exwm kept silently failing to start for days. Eventually I found out that I was missing the image for one of my custom cursors (nothing emacs is normally concerned with) and this was causing exwm to fail without a helpful error message.
So, Glass Cannon, and the Glass means I cannot recommend exwm generally, but the Cannon part is one I would hate to live without.