I made this video about 2016 years ago. The sound quality is horrible, but still some useful info for people who wants to test out the Enlightenment window manager.
Transcript (English)
Hi everyone, my name is Cristian. This is my first video on YouTube.
I’m going to cover the Enlightenment desktop environment, its basic configuration, and what I like to do before I start using it.
Enlightenment is a compositing environment, so you can use cool 3D effects, and it’s also very fast—but it’s not super stable. It’s usable, but it can crash sometimes. If it does, remember the side menu: you can choose Enlightenment → Restart to reload your current profile and reopen your windows, so it’s not a big deal.
Today I made a short list of what I’ll cover:
- Initial setup and what happens the first time you start Enlightenment after a fresh install with no configuration files.
- How to emulate a fresh start via Settings → Profiles if you want to save or reset a profile. I go to Profiles and use that to start clean.
When you first launch Enlightenment you pick system language and keyboard. I keep the UI in English because translations are often poor (also in Windows) and error messages are harder to search, but I do use a Swedish keyboard. I stick with the standard Enlightenment profile—tiling is interesting (I like i3 for travel) but here I’m using the stacking setup.
Next you pick the bar size. Don’t go too small; 1.0 is fine. For focus, I prefer “click to focus” over “focus on mouse enter” to avoid the pointer jumping to the next window when closing things. I use Network Manager (better VPN support than ConnMan), OpenGL compositing, and I skip package updates because I’m on Arch and already up to date.
With a fresh profile some defaults are annoying: Alt + right-click shows the window menu instead of resize, and there’s no snap tiling. You can still tile with Meta + arrow keys (left/right) to place windows side by side. The Terminology terminal is nice—lightweight with good text selection.
Run-Everything (Alt + Esc) is handy: it lists open programs, applications, windows, and settings. For window resizing I remap Alt + right-click to “Window Resize” under Settings → Input → Mouse Bindings; middle-click defaults don’t work well on many touchpads.
Enable the system tray: Settings → Extensions/Modules → load “System Tray”, then right-click the shelf → Content → add System Tray. To show applets (e.g., Network Manager), right-click the tray, open settings, and enable X embed.
That’s it: basic tray, better mouse behavior, and a clean starting profile. If you want more, drop a comment with requests (Linux/Windows topics welcome).