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In my daily work I use a lot vim as my editor and the tiling window manager awesome. In my opinion both are great tools. What I don't like about awesome (and multiple other tiling window managers) are the unpleasant key-combinations like WIN+ANY OTHER KEY.

Is there any tiling window manager, which behaves like vim with its normal- and insert-mode? Where you can hit for example the windows-key to get in the window-manager-mode (like vims normal mode), do some window-arranging and -moving stuff and hit windows-key again or some other key to get back into "insert-mode" where every keystroke is catched by the active window?

If not, is it possible to let the win-key or any other modifier-key behave like Capslock? So that you keep in Win-mode until you hit the windows-key again?

To be clear: I do not mean a window manager which behaves like vims window management, but which haves two different modes, which you can reach with a simple keystroke. One mode in which every keystroke is a window-management-command and the other mode, which sends every keystroke to the current active window.

I already saw this question, but I think it was misunderstood and closed without any meaningful answer.

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lslah
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  • What other TWMs did you try before asking? – romainl May 18 '13 at 11:19
  • Well, I only tried i3 besides awesome. But every other TWM I know (by knowing I mean, I read articles about or saw screencasts), uses a modifier-key, so that you need to hit at least two keys at once. For me it gets even worse if there are combinations like WIN+Shift+k or WIN+CTRL+k to get things done, like rearranging your windows or selecting other tags. But if you know TWMs which does not behave like this, I would appreciate if you leave me a hint! – lslah May 18 '13 at 11:58
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    Even though I think this is a cool question, it doesn't really belong on stackoverflow, maybe superuser.com would be more appropriate. – Michael Anderson May 18 '13 at 13:59
  • This kind of behaviour could be implemented with something like [Autohotkey](http://www.autohotkey.com/). I've been fooling around with "modes" in my experimental script, [vim.ahk](https://github.com/mihaifm/vim.ahk), where you can have a separate mode for each window. But it's largely experimental and unsuccessful. – mihai May 22 '13 at 21:31

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