why don’t you just try it and see if you personally like it for your personal tasks and requirements

I loved it. If I don’t need to be on a MS Windows machine, I would use EXWM as my daily driver. On Linux it was without problems. Yes, make keybindings and functions for sound, brightness and applications I want to start was a little bit of work. A little bit work with the configuration of X, like the mouse pointer, etc…

I use EXWM daily and I think it is the best user experience without needing the mouse. I have tested i3 in the past but I feel it limited at some points… Anyway, I agree that it is a personal choice and you should give a try!

I recently tried exwm on my janky-monitor desk/laptop. Had some learning experiences with xorg and use-package. Ultimately gave up for now because of Xorg’s horrible performance over VNC (long story but basically the only way to use 3 monitors on that laptop is beaming the display across the room and back thru a cable). But if your setup is any more straightforward than mine, it’s probably amazing.

Also curious, does it still hangs with ‘M-x gnus’ or any other time consuming command?

I agree that EXWM is in general a very pleasant experience, I used it for several years. But I have now given up on it and switched to sway. The issue was apps that created floating windows, I never got that to work smoothly. Just saving a file to disk in the web browser was a pain.

I thought it was ALMOST good enough when i used it, like maybe five years ago. I’m sure it’s even better now.

It is a great WM, the only really downside is the single threaded bit, which you can fix by opening another instance of emacs and passing keycaps directly, so that you run any processes that you know will block you in any time, in the created instance, this with emacs server is all you need.

Does anyone here know about the possibility of an Emacs Wayland compositor? I saw this a while ago, but I haven’t heard anything since.

https://emacsconf.org/2022/talks/wayland/

I have been using it as my daily driver for years. i3 comes close but the shear emacsiness of the exwm experience is impossible to beat. I don’t run very long jobs in elisp and so the single-threaded issue has not bitten me. Your task spec seems similar to mine and so it should be a good fit. Give it a go!

I’ve been daily driving EXWM for about 3 years now and I love it. I haven’t noticed any performance problems and it should work great for just opening the apps you listed.

EXWM being single-threaded (and just being in Emacs) is still somewhat of an issue in that if you’re toying with Emacs and accidentally freeze or crash it, everything else goes down with the ship. It’s not that often of a problem in my experience and I personally find the benefits of EXWM totally outweigh this problem.

I used EXWM for years and it was great. No real performance issues, and rarely did its single threaded nature cause a problem.

But I ended up switching to StumpWM because I prefer running a single Emacs instance that I can restart without restarting my whole window manager. And StumpWM can still be controlled in Emacs via SLY.

But it’s not nearly as intuitive as Emacs, as it acts more like tmux than an extension of Emacs window management.

I have been using exwm for about 2 years, there are some weirdness. When it comes to switching buffer preview with consult, the minibuffer loses focus when in a firefox buffer. And the support for wine application is utterly garbage, sometimes, I cannot even type in the wine application. In my dual monitors setup, I have to do some workaround to switch between monitor easily.

I have been trying other keyboard-centric window managers, like i3, dwm, stumpwm. None of them even come close to the integration of Emacs by exwm.

If I have time, I may try to fix the above issues myself, since the exwm has been abandoned by the author for quite some years, and the current maintainer kindly took over to accept pull request.

How well EXWM performs nowadays?

IME the same of yesterday, I mean it’s a WM, no special compiz/beryll alike effects or so…

Is it resource heavy compared to other tiling window managers?

EXWM run on top of Emacs, so definitively it demand more resources than an X standalone WM, but itself it’s very light. The point of EXWM is living in Emacs, it’s a nonsense choosing it for just the WM.

Is it still an issue EXWM not being multi-threaded?

Generally speaking yes, but no. Normally you have to do nothing blocking so there is no issue. RARELY I experience something but it’s honestly not a problem and the ability to have my X11 stuff in Emacs it’s so much powerful that I do not want to switch to anything else…