Ion (based on PWM) is a new kind of window manager that brings a
text-editorish, keyboard friendly user interface to window management. 

Modern GUIs are unusable. Overlapping windows are hard to manage, especially
from the keyboard, and the user often ends up in a jungle. Not to mention the
application programs, which are even worse. Mouse-based search-and-click
interfaces are slow - keyboard is fast having learnt the commands. Ion (the
last three letters of vision =-) was written as an example and an experiment of
something presumably better (just the window manager, though). 

Ion simply divides the screen into frames that take the whole screen. Big
displays have so much space that this is convenient and smaller displays
couldn't show more than one window at a time anyway. The frames can be split
and growing the size of one will shrink others. Alike in PWM, clients can be
moved between frames and multiple clients can be attached to one frame. 

With Ion you will hardly ever have to touch the mouse again for navigation
between windows and the windows are always in order. 

WWW: http://www.students.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/

-- Robert Ricci
   ricci@cs.utah.edu