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It's been so long that many will not know what this is about. wmii is a lightweight, dynamic window manager for X11 that can be scripted with any language. It's not for everybody, but a few of us consider it way superior to the mainstream tools (I include all OSX has to offer here) in terms of workflow --- more on this below.

ruby-wmii is a wmii configuration and scripting system that controls the wmii WM. I had been procrastinating the long-needed update of ruby-wmii to make it work with recent versions of wmii under the excuse that wmii was a moving target and there hadn't been a stable release (not a development snapshot) for a long time. wmii 3.6 got finally released a couple weeks ago, which means that I was beginning to consider updating ruby-wmii some day, when Nathan Weizenbaum went ahead and ported it to 3.6. Big kudos go to him; who knows how long it would have taken me otherwise :)

I've migrated a few of my X sessions to 3.6 (dog-feeding means quicker bug correction), and the latest code can be found in the darcs repositories (that integrate Nathan's patches) at http://eigenclass.org/repos/ruby-wmii/head/ and http://eigenclass.org/repos/ruby-wmii/branch-ruby-ixp/

(The repositories with the 3.1 branches can be found here.)

Why you might like wmii

wmii supports very dynamic work patterns thanks to a few fundamental features that aren't AFAIK combined in any other WM (apart from dwm, modulo the lack of scriptability):

• wmii is a tiling WM; you don't have to worry about overlapping windows and their positions/sizes
• you rarely (if ever) need a mouse. All but a few actions can be bound to arbitrary keys, and you don't have to take your hands away from the keyboard.
• the column layout with split, maximized and stacked modes is close to ideal. The stacked mode (a sort of vertical tabbing) is superior to plain old tabs.
• a client can be in different workspaces (with different geometries) at a time
• arbitrarily complex behavior can be scripted in any language and associated to any keybinding or a number of events
• in general, wmii's tagging system allows you to manage the applications very dynamically.

The last point is hard to get across without a screencast (I'll try to prepare one... someday). The best way is probably to point at the problems faced with other tools and explain how they are addressed in wmii.

Multiple desktops/workspaces are by no means new; any respectable window manager has had them for years, and they're becoming more common now with Leopard's Spaces. They are typically used in a fairly static way: you have a "web" workspace, a "IM/IRC" one, another for consoles, etc. Within each workspace, non-tiling WMs force you to place the windows carefully.

Note: you might want to skip this: it's way too long. I'm sorry, I had no time to make it shorter today.

This screencast shows how Ara Howard manages one such workspace. It's not a bad setup, that's how I did things a few years ago when I used KDE; I just find my current approach better.