Now it is time to start diving into the wmii user experience. I suggest you to try everything described by yourself immediately, instead of first reading it, to avoid "memory leakage". It is very helpful, if you print this document on paper or have it available on a different screen, because you might not be able to view it during your first steps in wmii.
Note, that the MOD key I am referring to, may resemble different keys on different systems. By default it is the Mod1 or Alt key in X11. Normally this is the key labelled with Alt on your keyboard.
The notation MOD-Key means to press MOD and Key both at the same time.
All key combinations can be freely configured, but for the sake of simplicity I'll stick with the default key combinations for this guide. You will learn how to alter the bindings in the section 6.
The default key combinations heavily use the home row navigation keys h (left), j (down), k (up), and l (right), which are associated with the specific direction.
Start your X session now. Since it is the first time you start wmii, a window with a little tutorial will show up. You are free to read it, but you may also follow this guide :-)
First of all, press MOD-Enter to start an xterm. It will take half of the vertical space, so you have two equally arranged windows. If you press MOD-Enter again, you have three windows that are arranged equally.
To switch between the three windows, press MOD-j, which cycles the focus between the three windows.
You can also press MOD-k to switch to the window above or MOD-j to switch to the window below the current.
Now look at the title-bars of those windows. They display important information: the first label contains the tag of the window. The second label displays the window's title.
Similar information is displayed in the status-bar at the bottom. The first labels display the tags currently in use and highlight the currently selected view. On the right side some status information is displayed, by default the system load and the current time (see subsection 6.5 for details).
As described earlier, wmii uses columns to arrange your windows. Your view already consists of a single column. Next, you will create a new column.
In wmii columns always consists of at least a single client, thus to create a new column, you need at least two clients at hand.
Now focus a client of your choice and press MOD-Shift-l, which moves the client rightwards. As you see, wmii creates a new column by dividing the view horizontally in two equally big areas. The focused client has been moved into the new column.
If you close the last client of a column, the column is destroyed immediately. If the last client of the current view is closed, the view will be removed accordingly as well.
If you press MOD-j to change focus, you will see that wmii actually cycles the focus in the current column only.
To change the focus to a different column, you can press MOD-l (right) and MOD-h (left) respectively.
It is also possible to swap adjacent clients among columns. To swap clients leftwards, press MOD-Control-h. To swap clients rightwards, press MOD-Control-l.
Layouts arrange clients in a column. They are related to a single column. Thus it is possible to have different columns in one view, each using another layout.
The default layout arranges each client of the column with equally vertical space. You can enable this layout with MOD-d (where the ``d'' stands for default) explicitly.
The stacking layout can be enabled with MOD-s. As you see now, there is only one client using as much space as possible, and only title-bars of the other clients displayed in the column. You can switch between the clients in the column using MOD-j.
The max-layout maximises all clients to the same geometry as the column. Only the focused client is displayed at a time, all other clients are behind it. You can switch between the clients with MOD-j.
To handle clients in the classical way, like in conventional window managers, the so-called ``floating layer'' is used. Actually there are a bunch of clients which don't fit well into the tiled world, because they have been designed with the conventional window management in mind, for instance clients like the Gimp or xmms.
While wmii is a dynamic window manager, which does the window arrangement for you automatically, those old fashioned programs rely on the conventional window managing concept, where all the clients fly around on your desktop and you are forced to constantly order the mess.
To attach such broken clients to the floating layer, you can toggle the focus between floating and managed layer through pressing MOD-Space. The MOD-Shift-Space shortcut toggles the focused window between floating and managed layer.
Note, the floating layer is addressed as the zeroth-column internally.
Up to now all your clients were tagged with ``1'', and you only had this single view. But a single view does not scale well, once too many clients appear which are used for different unrelated tasks. Thus you might want to have a view per task, e.g. a view with your editor and your programming tools, another view with your browser, and a third view with your music jukebox.
The good news is, that the tagging concept provides a very dynamic way to achieve such kinds of grouping.
You can give the focused client another tag by pressing MOD-Shift-Number, number being one of the numbers 0 to 9.
You can then switch views through pressing MOD-Number.
Normally, whenever a new client appears, it automatically inherits the tag of the currently selected view.
Note, there are more powerful uses of tags you will learn about in the next chapter. You will then be able to assign multiple tags to one client and to use proper strings as tags.
Most X-clients have a menu option or button to be closed. For the rare cases they don't provide a mouse-driven way, like in most terminals, you can press MOD-Shift-c to close a window.
You may start programs from a terminal. But wmii contains a special keyboard-driven program menu, which is accessible through pressing MOD-p. Please note, that the content of this menu is provided by a simple shell-script.
You will see a list of programs. If you start typing, the menu will cut the list and only display items which match the input you entered so far (in that order). Whenever there is only one item left, the menu highlights it and you can start it by pressing Enter. You are free to cancel any action by pressing ESC.
Thus, if you want to start firefox, just type ``fire'' and press enter 7.