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Cardboard; an exciting scrollable tiling window manager

  * Daniel Aleksandersen
  * 2022-02-16
  * 3 minute read

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I've been having a lot of fun with Cardboard, the scrollable tiling
window manager (WM) (STWM) for Linux. It's quite an unusual WM, and
it's really only at the prototype stage. After the initial learning
curve, I found that it helped me stay focused on one task, and it
greatly reduced how much time I spent rearranging my windows.

[INS::INS]

You're probably most familiar with a stacking WM; an environment
where you [mostly manually] arrange windows next to - or on top of
each other. This is what you'll be familiar with from Windows and
MacOS.

Cardboard automatically arranges all windows side-by-side on a
continuous scrolling horizontal plane. As you switch between apps,
either by keyboard shortcuts or by scrolling, you move left or right
through the scrolling plane of windows. It's a bit hard to describe,
so I made a little demo video:

Cardboard window manager demo video

The WM isn't suitable for day-to-day use by most users. It doesn't
support drag-and-drop and other features most people would consider
being necessities. It doesn't have any default keyboard shortcuts or
a global toolbar with niceties like a clock and system power
controls.

Cardboard gives you a blank slate, and you need to configure it to
get a useful experience. I contributed a quick start guide to the
project's documentation if you still want to give it a go.

Cardboard has its fair share of quirks and it crashes every so often.
I couldn't keep using it even though I was highly motivated and
interested. I've moved back to using a more battle-tested traditional
stacking WM for now.

What fascinated me about Cardboard was the core mechanics of its
STWM. It's super optimized for the way I work on a computer. I
usually have two different apps side-by-side, something you can
comfortably fit within the dimensions of a regular laptop screen.

However, I often need three things side by side, and I frequently
don't need more than two-out-of-three things side by side but with an
easy way to switch between them. I also have adjacent app windows
that live kind of to the side of the main apps I use.

[INS::INS]

An STWM makes this workflow a breeze. I just put my windows in order
of how frequently I need to access them, and scroll side to side as
my app needs changes. I feel like there's less overhead and less
distracting to switching between tasks. I also don't find myself
accidentally ending up looking at the wrong window and getting
distracted.

Other STWMs include PaperWM, the inspiration for Cardboard, and
EndlessWM. There are also some earlier implementations of this
concept, but it would require a lot of work to get them running on
modern-day Linux.

PaperWM is an extension to the GNOME Desktop; building on the
project's great work and user experience by introducing the behavior
of an STWM. It might not work with your version of GNOME, however.
The project has trouble keeping up with the changing environment from
the upstream GNOME project.

EndlessWM is another proof-of-concept WM that closely resembles
Cardboard. However, the project made an unfortunate early development
decision and stagnated after an upstream dependent project ended
support.

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The image "Scrollable Window Manager" (attribution link) by (c) 2022 
Daniel Aleksandersen is licensed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 License.
Ctrl blog by (c) 2022 Daniel Aleksandersen.

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