5 months of CellWM

I have now used CellWM for around 5 months and it has been a fun adventure. This is an update on what worked and didn't and next steps from here on out.

I have, perhaps more than I originally anticipated, enjoyed and made use of the multiple rows of cells concept that underpins CellWM. In typical use, I go upto 4-5 rows of use, with the 9th row (ie the -1th) being used as a catch all for random one of processes and terminals.

Each row holds a project and typically follows my usual convention of first column for Firefox, second for terminals, third for Emacs and the rest assorted.

My first row is my primary, as always - which has things like Mail, Slack, Teams, Todo listing (via toodoo.el) permanently open. The first 3-4 columns are for project specific windows. The other rows 2-5 have only project specific stuff - so 3-4 columns only in use.

Movement bewteen the rows was good for the most part. There were a few occasions where I had to do double-moves to get to where I wanted to do go - once across rows, and once across columns. This was an indication to move out browser tabs into their own windows to be placed into that project's row. This did cause some friction, I need to find a way to make this easier.

Key takeaway: Rows very good. Small part of the full matrix used.

The limitation of only 2 windows per cell did not cause issues. I ended up using a single cell in monocle mode for 90% of the time and in the rare occasion, used the tiled view.

Key takeaway: Monocle is what I need most of the time.

The concept of hand worked out well - though the extra key move did cause a bit of a friction. Still, I felt going with the hand was a better decision than using a 3-key modifier like "Alt + Shift + Ctrl" or something.

Now, to the ugly: I did have multiple crashes due to the exact same reason everytime: LibreOffice and it's crash-recovery process. LO was one of those applications I used regularly which opened more than 2 windows at a time. Initially, in Jan, I only handled a single had at a time, which means the 4th window would go into unspecified territory and X11 crashed. Not nice at all!

I did fix this issue by extending the Hand to hold multiple windows, and it stemmed the problem a bit - but one too many times I had LO crash on me. I have not yet found the source of this problem, frustratingly.

Apart from these issues, CellWM was surprisingly stable on me. Of course, I didn't even try opening Gimp or the like where a large number of windows are opened!

Key Takeaway: some session killing bugs present and triggered by specific applications opening too many windows. Cell's fundamental design flaw is the restriction of 2 windows per cell.