Introduction

Notion is a tiling, tabbed window manager for the X window system:

  • Tiling: you divide the screen into non-overlapping 'tiles'. Every window occupies one tile, and is maximized to it
  • Tabbing: a tile may contain multiple windows - they will be 'tabbed'
  • Static: most tiled window managers are 'dynamic', meaning they automatically resize and move around tiles as windows appear and disappear. Notion, by contrast, does not automatically change the tiling. You're in control.
Features include:
  • Workspaces: each workspace has its own tiling
  • Multihead: the mod_xinerama plugin provides very nice dual-monitor support
  • RandR: mod_xrandr picks up changes in the xrandr configuration without the need for restarting Notion (read this, though)
  • Extensibility: Notion can be extended with lua scripts. Browse through the scripts collection
Supported platforms:
  • Linux
  • Solaris (Solaris 10, OpenSolaris as well as OpenIndiana)
  • NetBSD
  • FreeBSD is not currently supported, but Notion is reported to work on FreeBSD quite easily. An unofficial 'port' has been created at github

Documentation

The manual page is a good reference. For an introduction, you may follow the tour

For advanced configuration documentation, see Configuring and extending Notion with Lua [pdf].

For writing patches and modules, see Notes for the module and patch writer [pdf]

For additional notes, consult our wiki

Changes

Changes since the original fork of Ion:

  • Handle XConfigureRequestEvent's moving transient dialogs to incorrect locations (#3167262)
  • Addition of 'lazy_resize' winprop option for applications that resize slowly
  • EMWH: always encode _NET_WM_NAME as UTF8_STRING
  • EMWH: support for _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW
  • EMWH: fixed issue in _NET_WM_USER_TIME handling that caused new windows not to receive the focus (#3109576)
  • Fix miscalculations and infinite loops in tab width calculation
  • mod_xinerama: take into account changes to the screen topology without needing to restart Notion
  • mod_xinerama: support for overlapping screens
  • Introduce mod_xkbevents
  • mod_xrandr: introduction of a randr_screen_change_notify hook
  • Various cleanups to the build system, including improved autodetection of lua
  • Renamed project to Notion - required due to trademark/licensing terms

History

Notion is a fork of Ion, which has been abandoned by its original author, Tuomo Valkonen.

Former Ion3 users will be glad to hear any changes to configuration will be backwards-compatible, so you can simply drop your ~/.ion3 tweaks into ~/.notion and rename cfg_ion.lua to cfg_notion.lua .

Support

If you want to get in touch, check out our mailinglists

Bugs and feature requests

Report your bugs and feature requests in the sf.net trackers

Code

Download

No binary releases of Notion are available at this time.

You can download a convienent source package from the sf.net files section or clone our git

Git

A git repository with the latest version is available here

. Visit the Development wiki for build instructions.

License

Notion is available under a slightly modified LGPL license: in short, the only extra restriction is you cannot release it under the name 'Ion' and cannot mix it with GPL code, but read the license itself for details.

Other software

Supplemental

The following software combines well with Notion:

  • stalonetray shows FreeDesktop (XEmbed) and KDE trayicons
  • trayion shows FreeDesktop (XEmbed) trayicons (like Qt4 and gtk2)
  • arandr a flexible tool for manipulating your monitor layout, resolutions, orientations
  • autocutsel for keeping various clipboards synchronized
  • parcellite more advanced clipboard management (with history)

Tweaks

Some software works with better with Notion when the configuration is slightly tweaked. Check the Application-specific tweaks wiki page for more information.

Similar

Notion is rather unique, but the following window managers might be considered similar:

  • i3 (dynamic, though with better support for tabs than most. A bit unstable, no scratchpad, no dockapp support)
  • awesome
  • dwm (dynamic, no tabbing)
  • wmii (tabbing seems inconvenient)
  • wmfs (no tabs though
  • ratpoison (no tabbing though)
  • xmonad (rather complicated/geek-oriented)
  • scrotwm
  • tritium (python, seems to suffer from artifacts and performance problems)
  • twindy (currently unmaintained, fixed to 2 panels per workspace)