Adam's sawfish page

sawfish (formerly known as sawmill) is an excellent window manager for X11. I've tried virtually every X11 WM out there, and eventually settled on sawfish. Why do I love it? Here are some of the reasons:

It's small and fast.
It's jam-packed with out-of-the-box features; there's very little it can't do that other window-managers can, and if you really miss a particular feature ...
You can arbitrarily enhance it by writing extensions in rep, a dialect of lisp. See below for my sawfish extensions.
Even for people uncomfortable with the thought of hacking lisp, it's highly customisable.
It looks great. All the most popular enlightenment themes have been ported to it, and what's more, you can have more than one theme on the screen at once!
It has fantastic support. John Harper, the author, generally replies to worthwhile (i.e. non-FAQ) questions on the mailing list within a day or two, sometimes quicker. There are other helpful people on the list too.

Adam's sawfish extensions

focus-tracker.jl

I wanted to see how much time I was spending on the computer doing worthwhile things, and how much time I was spending just messing around. So I hacked up a bit of rep code which prints a line to a log file every time the mouse pointer enters a new window, and then I wrote a quick Perl script to calculate some statistics from the log file.

Download

Install

(In the following instructions, if you're running a very old version of sawfish which is still called sawmill, replace every mention of sawfish with sawmill.

Put this in your .sawfishrc:

  (setq load-path (cons "~/.sawfish" load-path))
  (require 'focus-tracker)

Put focus-tracker.jl in ~/.sawfish.

Type

  sawfish-client -- < ~/.sawfish/focus-tracker.jl

to activate it immediately, or restart sawfish.

When your log file builds up, run time-spent.pl to see how much time you're wasting :-)