💻 Emacs X Window Manager Review

First Published: 2023-12-03
EXWM - ef-maris-dark theme

So one week ago I decided to scrap my awesomewm config in favor of EXWM. This has resulted in an noticeably more unified and fluent computing environment. Now I can use my emacs bindings to launch and manipulate X windows! One necessary workaround to make all my keybindings work in X windows was to add the global-prefix of general.el to the exwm-input-prefix-keys¹

One thing I don't like is how EXWM handles workspaces, as buffers are not shared between them.
Because of this I currently only use one workspace, but I may look into perspective.el to replicate workspace functionality with shared buffers

One problem I didn't encounter nearly as much as expected was emacs locking up.
With emacs being single threaded, some EXWM reviews mention that you frequently have to spam escape or C-g to kill some blocking task. This has only happened to me once when viewing a ~20000x10000 pixel jpeg and once when I spawned mpv from dired synchronously via ! instead of asynchronously via &

EXWM, once set up, comes with zero learning curve for anyone already accustomed to emacs.
Since I do most of my computing in emacs anyway, the move to EXWM was a natural next step.
The only scenario in which I could see myself switching back to a separate window manager would be if multi-monitor support² turns out to be poor when I'll need it again in January


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