[HN Gopher] Linux: We need tiling desktop environments
___________________________________________________________________
Linux: We need tiling desktop environments
Author : ashitlerferad
Score : 135 points
Date : 2024-08-26 15:05 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (linuxblog.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (linuxblog.io)
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Love both i3wm and Sway WM. This is what computing should be.
|
| Windows has surprisingly decent tiling functions out of the box,
| too, but you'd never realize it without some experimentation.
| Next time you're at a Windows box, try holding Win, maybe Shift
| as well, and mashing the arrow keys. A minute or two of
| experimentation might make your whole $DAYJOB workflow that much
| more enjoyable!
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| It's the one thing I hack into macOS (I use BetterTouchTool for
| this but only because I already have a license from back when I
| wanted to mod my TouchBar), and would otherwise genuinely miss
| coming from any other operating system. I think even iPadOS has
| tiling shortcuts!
| nerdponx wrote:
| You can also get true tiling window management with Amethyst,
| or Hammerspoon if you love customizing things in Lua and
| starting from an absolutely empty configuration.
| Reefersleep wrote:
| Just want to add that I'm having a pretty good experience
| with Amethyst. No file-based configuration, sadly, but it
| does all of the tiling and movements I need.
|
| Hammerspoon (via Spacehammer) seemed too slow for me.
| lambdaba wrote:
| Rectangle (https://rectangleapp.com/) makes macOS window
| management good enough (for a non-tiling WM), by adding
| keyboard shortcuts and drag gestures.
| swah wrote:
| And the new MacOS version also finally got Windows XP style
| tiling. (I still like Rectangle because I can do it from a
| longer distance..)
| kalaksi wrote:
| KDE also has extensive keyboard shortcuts for window management
| (among other things) but most of them are not set by default.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| I didn't know that! Tracks with my experience with playing
| around with KDE, like, a decade ago. So much user-
| configurable power lying just under the surface.
| chuckadams wrote:
| One thing I love about kwin is that the expose feature lets
| you navigate the windows with the keyboard. macOS itself
| doesn't have that feature.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I want to love KDE, I really do, but I've grown to love gnome
| and os x's ability to have close, min, max buttons down _in_
| the toolbar for apps as that saves a significant amount of
| screen real estate. I tried out kde plasma for a while and
| just couldn 't get past it.
|
| Having said that, I _did_ discover kde connect while using
| that, and I _love_ that app! It 's so nice for putting audio
| books on my phone and controlling playback
| dingnuts wrote:
| KDE has this feature now, you just have to add the global
| menu applet to your task bar and it will do the Unity/Apple
| thing where the task bar is relevant to the selected
| application
| c-hendricks wrote:
| Client Side Decorations are different than moving the
| menu bar.
|
| Even using the global menu in KDE (which isn't that new
| BTW, I think it was in KDE3), you'll still have a "height
| = title bar + toolbar", where with CSD it's "height =
| toolbar".
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I _hate_ the client-side decorations in gnome. I should
| note it moved my two most used buttons approximately 2000
| pixels away from each other (they used to be quite close)
| in my most used Gnome app, so it might not be an entirely
| rational hate.
|
| [edit]
|
| I should also say that Gnome apps with CSDs work just fine
| in KDE with kwin and hide the title bar automatically as
| expected (I use Evolution, and Document Scanner regularly).
| jwells89 wrote:
| Something that isn't clear to me is why there has to be a
| hard divide between CSD and SSD. Is there anything in the
| Wayland spec that prevents UI frameworks from saying,
| "hey windowmanager/compositor, here's where control
| widgets go for this window", allowing WM-drawn controls
| to live on the same plane of existence as program-drawn
| controls? That along with some way for the WM/compositor
| to tell the UI framework if the user wants a discrete
| titlebar or if they're cool with the UI framework doing
| its own thing seems like it'd make everybody happy.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Nothing technical in the way. I don't see Gnome adding
| such a feature though.
| NekkoDroid wrote:
| The main reason I know that GNOME doesn't implement xdg-
| decoration is to specifically not have to draw anything
| itself ontop of the surfaces of clients. It would then
| need to kinda synchronize the rendering of its stuff with
| the update loop of the application.
|
| The only time I can remember when Mutter/gnome-shell
| draws over the client is when it stops updating over the
| wayland socket (freezes), so there isn't really an update
| loop it needs to synchronize to.
| ar_lan wrote:
| For those on macOS, yabai + skhd have been part of my workflow
| for years now. They are fantastic to bridge the gap I miss so
| much from i3.
| chambored wrote:
| I switched to Aerospace from Yabai
| nicce wrote:
| I switched to Hammerspoon... seems to be good enough with
| enormous power if you know Lua.
| bluGill wrote:
| I tried that, but most apps just don't scale down well.
| Important UI elements just disappear, while less important
| elements maintain their size, unless the app has most of the
| screen. Those are apps like teams and outlook that I would
| expect most office users to keep open all the time on Windows
| (teams is really bad about assuming I want to see the avatar of
| whoever is speaking more than their slides). Edge did a little
| better, depending on the page I was looking at.
| pxc wrote:
| This is one of my pet peeves as a visually impaired person.
| Basically nothing scales right for me anymore. Apps and
| websites designed for desktops have such insane padding that
| when I scale them up, basic information is truncated.
|
| By the time they're easily readable for me, 'progressive'
| websites go into mobile mode and do things like collapse
| their (non-resizeable) sidebars. Last week I tried to cut
| down on excess padding in a sidebar by resizing it and
| literally watched it go from 40% excess/wasted horizontal
| space to completely collapsed and hidden behind another click
| (and thus unusable with keyboard friendly addons like
| Pentadactyl).
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| I do keep Outlook and Teams open basically all the time, and
| full-screened, yes. Here I can only counsel that having
| multiple smaller monitors was a wiser investment dollar per
| dollar than one big monitor.
| nicce wrote:
| There is also rather new decent competitor for Sway:
| https://hyprland.org/
| noinsight wrote:
| Tiling wm's are a niche within a niche (Linux on the desktop)...
| you can't really expect much engineering resources to be devoted
| to them.
| doubled112 wrote:
| In real life, in the probably hundreds of developers and IT
| professionals I've worked with, I've met exactly one who was
| actually using a tiling window manager.
|
| It was different enough to be a thing we playfully argued about
| often.
| elric wrote:
| Good window management is a niche skill (on the user side). I
| often see "normies" waste so much time tabbing between
| windows or turning their heads between monitors or whatnot.
| When I want stuff side by side, I press a hotkey to arrange
| stuff side by side. My WM has a bunch of tags (virtual
| desktops on steroids), where each tag has its own purpose and
| a dedicated default layout (tiled for terminals, fullscreen
| for a browser, etc).
|
| I feel like "tiled vs non-tiled" is a false dichotomy. It's
| tiled _and_ floating _and_ full screen _and_ spiraling _and_
| horizontal split _and_ vertical split, etc.
|
| The right tool for the job.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Absolutely agree. Use what works, and we should always be
| grateful to have good options.
|
| However there's a lot to most of the tiling window managers
| that never clicked for me. I've always assumed it's a
| personal problem. Perhaps I have spent an unreasonable
| amount of time thinking about "why not?"
|
| I'm not good at remembering keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl+Z
| seems to be all I need.
|
| I've tried sorting and categorizing apps into tags, but it
| makes me slower. If apps open on a virtual desktop that I
| couldn't see, I'd just lose it. If I can't see something it
| stops existing pretty quickly, which makes even too many
| virtual desktops a losing battle.
|
| Inconsistent behaviour will always pull me out of whatever
| I'm doing. 4 apps tiled, 5th app opens in a floating
| window, now I'm distracted.
|
| For now I use a single 4K monitor at 100% scaling with a
| couple of virtual desktops. Current task(s) and background
| apps.
|
| I haven't spent much time managing windows since. Once the
| windows are open for the day, that's a solved problem.
| Memory is cheap. Windows mostly open where I left them last
| time.
|
| There's a certain cognitive load to keeping all of that
| straight. The computer is supposed to do the thinking and
| apparently I can't.
| tmtvl wrote:
| Awesome is very appropriately named. (I presume you're
| using awesome because of the combo of tags and layouts is
| something I've only encountered there)
|
| I actually have a configuration where I use it as window
| manager for KDE, to get most of the best of two worlds
| (awesome is my favourite window manager and KDE is a
| desktop environment I'm quite fond of).
| dingnuts wrote:
| I've met a handful, certainly a sizable portion of those who
| ran Linux on their work machines. Notably i3 and Sway I've
| spotted during demos from extremely talented engineers.
| Anecdotes to be sure.
| rout39574 wrote:
| I don't think many of the folks you refer to with cut their
| teeth on anything but Windows or Mac windowing environments.
|
| I started my serious interactions with graphical computing in
| a debate about twm vs. vtwm vs. tvtwm vs. ctwm and what-not
| in the late 80s, early 90s. How do I want my applications
| arranged? Spatially? or by topic? Do I want indicators like
| "You have mail!" to be glued to my viewport, or in a
| particular virtual or topical location? blah blah blah.
|
| You can make a case that it was time wasted to think about
| those things. But the folks who grew in MS Windows feel to me
| like a crowd unaware that they're wearing manacles, "unable
| to imagine" why someone would want to take them off.
|
| I don't know how to succinctly communicate how much mental
| effort is consumed just arranging displays, on the occasions
| I need to work in a more mainstream windowing environment.
| It's a mental tax, and you're just used to paying it.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > In real life, in the probably hundreds of developers and IT
| professionals I've worked with, I've met exactly one who was
| actually using a tiling window manager.
|
| I've yet to have a job that actually _allowed_ me to use the
| tiling WM of my choice (AwesomeWM). Most professional
| developers who love WMs simply cannot use it for work!
| lucasoshiro wrote:
| > you can't really expect much engineering resources to be
| devoted to them
|
| I wouldn't say that, given that we have plenty of tiling WMs
| are most of them are well-maintened. Not to mention Linux
| distros that already provide one of them as options, such as
| Manjaro.
|
| There's also Amethyst and Yabai for Mac, so, even if it is a
| niche there's demand for it
| elric wrote:
| I've exclusively used Awesomewm for the past 15ish years (with a
| brief attempt at Sway, but that's a story for another time). I
| don't understand what OP is talking about. Do they want more
| integration between the WM and the DE? If so, I don't understand
| why? AwesomeWM does everything I need it to do, without getting
| in my way.
|
| Maybe I'm misunderstanding OP?
|
| Edit: the comments on the blog post talk about integrations with
| things like volume management and network management, apparently
| that's (a|their) defintion of DE vs a WM. Those are not features
| I care about at all, so maybe I'm not the target audience here.
| AwesomeWM has plenty of widgets for volume or wifi or whatnot,
| but I mostly use a terminal.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Do they want more integration between the WM and the DE?
|
| Yes. I haven't used a DE in well over a decade, but I assume
| it's for stuff like being able to drag and drop from one window
| to another, etc.
|
| (Also a happy Awesome user for almost as long as you - although
| I still haven't learned Lua!)
| dingnuts wrote:
| There are a lot of little things that daemons like gsettingsd
| handles, like resolution changes if you add a monitor or change
| the size of the window you're using your VM in, that you have
| to do manually if you are not using a desktop environment
|
| I got tired of doing that stuff manually ten years ago, myself.
| when I plug in a USB stick I just want it to mount, I don't
| need to wind up reading the mount man page. I have shit to do.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Yeah, many years ago I ran a crunchbang-style setup with
| openbox and tint2 and while the low resource usage and
| customizability was great, it was irritating having to find
| and set up daemons, tray items, etc (all of which seemingly
| coming with their own list of incapabilities/tradeoffs) for
| every little thing. I absolutely sympathize with minimizing
| bloat, but it feels like things like volume keys should fall
| within the scope of bare minimum out of the box
| functionality.
| kergonath wrote:
| We had Moom on the front page yesterday. I would adopt it in a
| heartbeat on Linux if I could. It is easy to use, easy to
| understand, great even with a mouse and does not require you to
| remember yet another dozen of keyboard shortcuts (though you can
| if you want). Using the finer grid is a pleasure and it works
| great.
|
| All the alternatives I tried have huge technical barriers to
| entry.
| medo-bear wrote:
| Objectively speaking, nothing comes close to StumpWM
| BeetleB wrote:
| What are the advantages of StumpWM over Awesome?
| tmtvl wrote:
| Because we're on HN I'd say that StumpWM being made in Common
| Lisp may be trotted out as the main advantage. Personally I'm
| quite fond of it having Emacs-like key chording (it's the
| keyboard equivalent of a cascading menu versus a flat menu).
| That said I'm so fond of awesome's tags and layouts that I
| can't bring myself to switch over (and programming those
| myself is way above my skill level).
| lucasoshiro wrote:
| The last versions of KDE Plasma 5 offered tiling windows as an
| option, and it could be configured to be used only with the
| keyboard, like a tiling WM. However it was not so polished (I was
| waiting it to be more usable) and I kept my KDE + XMonad
| configuration.
|
| However, after Plasma 6 that option was missing, and I my KDE +
| XMonad setup doesn't work anymore (perhaps I need to adapt it but
| I didn't have time to do that so far). Also, Wayland doesn't
| help: using a desktop environment with other window manager only
| works on X11.
|
| Does someone know what happened to tiling on Plasma 6?
| dizhn wrote:
| They ditched the existing stuff which were handled by third
| party software and started implementing new tiling
| functionality from scratch. It's a good faith effort to embrace
| tiling natively but this change meant they caused all existing
| solutions to break without providing anywhere near the same
| functionality. Hopefully they or 3rd parties will fix this in
| the future.
| lucasoshiro wrote:
| I hope so. I liked my KDE + XMonad setup, but picom really
| made my PC slow. A 100% KDE solution would be perfect, as I'm
| not a XMonad power user
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| AFAICT, KDE does exactly what he's looking for; integrating
| tiling into a full featured desktop manager.
| r14c wrote:
| I was upset with the KDE project for some years because they
| dropped amaroK during the transition from KDE 3 to 4, but after
| seeing the new work in Plasma and moving on to other music
| players once amaroK 3 rotted. I really love the work they've
| done and I'm back to having KDE as my daily driver. Previously
| I used wmii, dwm, and xmonad on different systems.
| codedokode wrote:
| I mostly use full-screen windows (effectively no windows at all).
| I think that floating windows and tiles are made for those with
| large expensive 4K monitors, but not for smaller screens.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| I work exclusively on the display of a 15-inch laptop, and I
| frequently have 2, less frequently 3, tiled windows.
| bluGill wrote:
| Most applications are designed for full screen on the common
| displays of their day. 1080p monitors are common enough that
| everybody still designs their apps for them and so you can use
| them less than full screen on a 4k monitor. Back when smaller
| monitors were common apps were designed for them and could be
| used tiled on 1080p monitors. If you can still find such an app
| it will work great tiled, but few projects allow for the idea
| that you might want to work on something else at the same time
| and so less than full screen is not something they allow UX to
| think about.
| solomonb wrote:
| Same. I've used XMonad forever but 90% of the time I have
| single applications open full screen. I use XMonad's tabs
| feature heavily. So in one virtual desktop I have an editor and
| a few terminals which I tab between, then in another virtual
| desktop I do the same for web browsing, and another virtual
| desktop for comms.
| JanMa wrote:
| That's also what works best for me! A single monitor and only
| one window on fullscreen. When I need to switch applications, I
| navigate to another fullscreen window. Sometimes I like to joke
| that my brain is single threaded :-)
| flabbergasted wrote:
| I'm surprised there hasn't been any mention of my favorite rust
| based tiling windows manager - LeftWM
| (https://github.com/leftwm/leftwm?tab=readme-ov-file#why-go-l...)
| entropie wrote:
| I use xmonad for well over a decade now. I tried others because
| ghc is a pretty big payload to maintain on a gentoo system but
| always came back to xmonad. I invested quite a big time in my
| config (I dont speak haskell, so it was sometimes pretty hard)
| but I would say my general config is quite minimal:
|
| 3 displays. 9 workspaces, named. Pretty basic tiled layouts.
| Named "scratchpads" (basicially popups with fixed
| client/programms; like a fullscreen popup with my terminal
| emulator with a tmux session a semi transparent pavucontrol and
| clipboard manager/copyq).
|
| Important: one hotkey to send the actual client to fullscreen (I
| have no idea why this feature seems to be a hard one when testing
| other tiling WMs).
|
| Hotkeys for switching displays.
|
| This seems (for me?) pretty basic needs but I found thats not
| easily reproducible with other tiling wms.
|
| Some time ago I introduced my GF to a thinkpad with my xmonad
| config and she was within a hour absolutely able to use a multi
| monitor setup comfortable with her keyboard. She really liked it.
|
| My config for reference:
| https://gist.github.com/entropie/c8072585593b784bff9b8af95c1...
| rout39574 wrote:
| XMonad mafia represent! :)
|
| My config is _koff_ more involved. I did a lateral from CTWM
| into XMonad quite a few years ago, so many of my keystrokes
| bring associated workspaces to their default locations.
|
| I've got 44 workspaces, and 6 displays, many of them loosely
| grouped into "document" pairs for working on different
| projects, and "monitoring" pairs for different focuses of
| _looking at_ different things. The monitoring pairs are much
| less intensively used.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| Feels good to see someone else who can't speak Haskell but
| struggles their way to a working xmonad config.
|
| I really want to just move to wayland and get it over with, but
| the tiling wm options are slim. I want a dynamic tiling setup,
| so sway isn't it. I think hyperland can do something similar
| but I don't want the candy associated with it. I just need the
| smallest overhead to throw windows into tiles.
| jzb wrote:
| For GNOME, the Tiling Shell extension works well for me. I've
| also used, and liked, gTile. Of course, with an extension there's
| always the danger that it will break between releases and/or the
| developer will get bored and stop maintaining it.
|
| The nice thing about Tiling Shell is that it's not all-or-nothing
| tiling. It's tiling when I want it, otherwise just "normal".
|
| COSMIC Desktop is promising, but has a lot of maturing to do.
| rom1v wrote:
| I think tiling is great for terminals, but not for the whole
| desktop (I don't want my web browser or video player to be
| resized because I open a new program).
|
| So I use a "normal" floating environment (xfce, but could be
| another one), and I use Terminator in full screen enabled on a
| specific shortcut, so that I have tiled terminals.
| anewguy9000 wrote:
| this. the uis for different apps have different needs - ex.
| keeping a video editor wide and narrow. and its not uncommon to
| want more apps open than would fit into their own tiles or
| having to move to another desktop workspace. i just wish there
| was a compositor or window manager for wayland that supported
| working this way, none really do. without a tiling wm, apps in
| gnome want to open right in the center of the screen, and don't
| remember their positions, its comically bad
| Suppafly wrote:
| >I think tiling is great for terminals, but not for the whole
| desktop (I don't want my web browser or video player to be
| resized because I open a new program).
|
| This, I can't imagine anyone wanting that sort of tiling.
| Anytime I have a use case for tiling in my own job it ends up
| being impossible to get things tiled the way I want and also
| have the things I don't want tiled setup correctly on my other
| screen.
| rout39574 wrote:
| Years of XMonad use here. Really, it's not the interference
| you are imagining.
|
| Much of the time I have a web browser using a whole portrait-
| aligned monitor, but sometimes I feel like having it 2-up in
| a landscape monitor.
|
| The win of nice clean window separation, without giving up
| significant percentage of my display space to window
| decoration, is -profound-.
|
| I have one pixel borders around my shells, and I have it
| because I fiddled with zero and decided I liked one better.
| How many pixels do you lose to decoration, so you can mouse
| over them cleanly? That's a major win.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Same experience with XMonad here. With modern responsive
| web UIs, I rarely find issue with resizing getting in my
| way.
|
| When I do, I either keep the fullscreen browser on a
| dedicated desktop or nudge the split point until I'm happy.
| nox101 wrote:
| > The win of nice clean window separation, without giving
| up significant percentage of my display space to window
| decoration, is -profound-.
|
| What does this have to do with a tiling window manager? I'd
| expect the app decides how to display window decoration,
| not the window manager. In fact I can confirm that right
| now since Chrome has different window decoration than say
| TextEdit. Also, scrollbars, macOS has them invisible by
| default so they don't take any space.
|
| As for 2-up. Both Windows and Mac have shortcuts for that
| case
| rout39574 wrote:
| You're incorrect: there might be some decoration provided
| by the app, but there's a layer outside of that which is
| configured by the window manager. That's the title bar,
| and the little icons by which you maximize/ minimize/
| "Iconify"... do people still do that?..
|
| Plus thumbs at the corners, for some displays.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Most tiling managers are in fact hybrid and allow floating
| windows. That is at least the case with sway and i3.
| rout39574 wrote:
| I'm not aware of any that don't include a floating option.
| lucasoshiro wrote:
| > I don't want my web browser or video player to be resized
| because I open a new program
|
| That's the reason why tiling wm users use multiple virtual
| desktops. In fact, switching between virtual desktops will
| behave like change maximized windows, unless the virtual
| desktop has more than one windows (those are the cases that you
| _want_ it to do that).
| skydhash wrote:
| Virtual desktop and tabbed windows (i3 and sway). My current
| setup is 1. Emacs 2. Firefox 3.
| Terminals 4. File Manager (gui) 6. Music
| (terminal) 7. Videos (mainly courses) 9. GUI
| utilities 10. Password Managers
|
| 5 and 8 are for projects and scratch layouts.
| subsection1h wrote:
| > _3. Terminals_
|
| Since you use Emacs, why not use Eat or vterm?
|
| https://codeberg.org/akib/emacs-eat
|
| https://github.com/akermu/emacs-libvterm
|
| > _4. File Manager (gui)_
|
| Why not use Dired?
|
| (More than 90% of the time, I only run Emacs, Firefox and
| nothing else, which is why tiling is useless for me.)
| skydhash wrote:
| Launching a terminal in sway is so easy ($mod+enter) that
| I haven't bothered to replicate the same thing in Emacs.
| As for the gui things, it's mostly for moving stuff
| between smb shares (I was tagging music files). Dired is
| great, but sometimes, I idled in mouse mode.
| kkfx wrote:
| Why not EXWM to have free tiling instead of using i3 like
| a set of FF tabs... That's was my path years ago, I've
| tried a bit i3 concluding it's rigid tiling model it's
| essentially useless and I've in the end use tabs/split
| screen and rarely stacks. Then EXWM, at first very hard
| to start as a WM (I was also new to Emacs, former
| hardcore vimmer) but thereafter... I can't even use
| floating WMs nowadays... Though I do not user
| eat/vterm/eshell simply because for casual terminal usage
| (living in Emacs makes me use the terminal much, much
| less) it's not that comfy.
|
| Dired on contrary is super good also to rename files en
| masse, to filter them and so on.
| mulmen wrote:
| I have a similar setup. Do you have this set up to launch
| the applications at boot? AFAIK Sway has no provision to
| store the layout between reboots, which is actually a
| feature.
| tmtvl wrote:
| > _1. Emacs 2. Firefox 3. Terminals_
|
| Funny, in awesome my layout is 1. Browser (FF and Dolphin),
| 2. Terminal, 3. Editor (Emacs). Continuing on from there my
| layout differs a bit more with 4. Documents (Okular and
| LibreOffice), 5. GUI (for when I want to try resizing a GUI
| program to see if its design is properly responsive), 6.
| Multimedia, 7. Miscellaneous.
| RsmFz wrote:
| But I never maximize my web browsers, either
| vidarh wrote:
| Yes and no. It's a reason why I use my own wm. I have a
| floating desktop and 9 tiling ones. By most of my browsing is
| on a tiling desktop that is usually single window but where I
| _do_ want it to split if I open another window
| mikojan wrote:
| > I don't want my web browser or video player to be resized
| because I open a new program
|
| You use tiling only if you intend to use tiling. Else you
| switch to another workspace or whatever.
|
| This is not so different from a normal desktop environment,
| except you hit, say, Meta+3 to find your web browser instead of
| hitting Alt+Tab over and over, accidentally missing your web
| browser, and doing it over and over again.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| This is what I thought as well before I moved to a tiling WM.
| But it turned out to be a non-issue for me. Just switch
| workplaces if you don't want to resize.
| celrod wrote:
| > I don't want my web browser or video player to be resized
| because I open a new program
|
| I've been using niri (a tiling WM) recently. This is their very
| first design principle:
| https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Design-Principles Maybe
| other PaperWM-inspired WMs are similar. niri is the first I've
| used.
|
| If your windows within a workspace are wider than your screen,
| you can scroll through them. You also have different workspaces
| like normal. I'll normally have 1 workspace with a bunch of
| terminals, and another for browsers and other apps (often
| another terminal I want to use at the same time as browsing,
| e.g. if I'm looking things up online).
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I _used_ to think this way, but having used popOs 's tiling in
| gnome I gotta say it's the best of all worlds. I really like
| being able to have code split with documentation or an ebook. I
| know you _can_ technically use the manual split L /R but having
| it autosplit is nice. I feel like it really supercharges my
| research workflow.
|
| If I don't want something to split, I can either turn off
| tiling and revert back to default gnome behavior (rare), add an
| exclusion for something I never want tiled, or most often I
| just send that app to a new virtual desktop.
| krferriter wrote:
| Yeah I think window half/quarter screen snapping (with keyboard
| shortcuts, which XFCE has) fills all the benefit of a tiling wm
| I want, without the constraints and with the flexibility of a
| floating wm.
|
| And I do heavily use tiles/panels in programs like Terminator
| and iTerm2 because it's helpful in a terminal context.
| Gormo wrote:
| That's exactly how I have XFCE set up, with Super+Numpad keys
| bound to each half/quarter of the screen (Super+5 for
| maximize). Works great, and I can get all of the benefits of
| tiling without the limitations.
| jwells89 wrote:
| I've never been able to make tiling-first environments work for
| me (even if they have a floating mode). Things that aren't
| terminals or text editors tend to not tile well, particularly
| on smaller screens, and using them entails a level of window
| micromanagement that I don't engage in with floating-first
| environments.
|
| The ability to overlap is also actually pretty valuable for me.
| Often I don't need to see a whole window, just the pertinent
| portion, and sometimes window edges peeking out from behind my
| browser window act like post-it note style reminders.
|
| It's nice to be able to snap windows into grid positions on
| occasion (preferably _without_ aero snap, the animations for
| that erroneously trigger way too often on multi monitor setups)
| but it 's easy enough to bolt that onto a floating WM.
| wongogue wrote:
| Check out scrolling window managers. Niri, paperwm etc.
|
| The windows are almost always full height and you just scroll
| to next or previous windows in the Workspace. It reduces the
| spatial navigation to just one axis and works pretty well on
| ultrawides.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Might give them a try when I get the chance, but I'm
| skeptical that those will be much better than tiling for my
| usage, particularly as someone who prefers a centered main
| monitor and angled secondary monitor over ultrawides.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Paper wms still tile. As in you can tile vertically as
| well. The difference is new windows open to the side full
| height, instead of trying to cram into a potentially
| already crammed layout. It's really powerful when you
| want to open a pdf or an image or something related to
| the stuff you are working on in a tiled workspace but
| don't want to resize everything.
| layer8 wrote:
| I just Alt+Tab instead and keep most windows centered.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > The ability to overlap is also actually pretty valuable for
| me. Often I don't need to see a whole window, just the
| pertinent portion, and sometimes window edges peeking out
| from behind my browser window act like post-it note style
| reminders.
|
| I have occasionally thought about a system where you can zoom
| and scroll a view on a window, but without telling the
| program that you're doing it. So for example, you could crop
| into say firefox and only show the actual page (completely
| cutting out toolbars and such) without it resizing itself.
| This is mostly of interest on smaller screens, but it'd still
| give you efficiency gains on a bigger screen.
| jwells89 wrote:
| That would be a useful feature, so long as there's some
| associated UI that makes it obvious that the feature is
| active along with an easy way to toggle it off. Seems like
| it could be one of those features that users accidentally
| trigger without realizing it and then feel "trapped" not
| knowing how to make it stop.
| nextos wrote:
| I experienced some of these issues. For me, what eventually
| clicked is either simple automated tiling (xmonad with
| fullscreen and split horizontal/vertical) or Emacs-like
| manual tiling (StumpWM). I don't have a huge screen, so more
| than two windows is a stretch. Both of these WMs are decent
| at floating layouts.
|
| Besides, I find the simple tiling offered by the stock GNOME
| Display Manager, which is similar to the way I use xmonad,
| good enough. Given that GNOME has great support for floating
| windows, that is perhaps an option you should look into.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| I use tmux (window tabs, vertical or horizontal pane splits)
| and opt-in tiling shortcuts for the desktop to quickly move
| apps to corner, top, bottom etc. Works for me.
| rom1v wrote:
| I used tmux before Terminator for my local usage, but the
| fact that a mouse selection covers all panes at once makes it
| really annoying.
|
| Tmux is great for remote/shared usage though (and it survives
| ssh disconnection).
| ranger207 wrote:
| Conversely I do like my web browser and video player to resize
| when I open something else, so that I can still see the
| entirety of the video or whatever when I pull up another
| document or page. The biggest problem in my experience is that
| many web pages are bad about resizing and lose your scroll
| position when resized
| layer8 wrote:
| > lose your scroll position when resized
|
| That's more a browser implementation issue in my view. It's a
| hard problem though in the general case, they'd have to
| identify the "main" content to synchronize on. Or, barring
| that, maybe they could determine the position that maximizes
| the total area of elements that remain in view.
| packetlost wrote:
| You act as if that's the only option! You can have tabbed or
| "stacked" layouts or use virtual desktops. I've been using
| exclusively tiling managers for a few years now and it's great.
| christophilus wrote:
| I agree. In my opinion, PaperWM and Niri solve this really,
| really well in my opinion. They don't resize anything-- just
| arrange everything on an infinite horizontal plane, and you
| move left / right through your windows.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Paperwm is amazing. I don't know how I can go back to alt tab
| now that I can navigate windows with arrow keys or hjkl,
| floating window managers seem Barbaric.
| nmg wrote:
| +1 for Terminator, my first install for 15+ years on Linux.
| Solid
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| You don't have to tile the browser or video player if you don't
| want. You can put those windows in a separate workspace or use
| a tabbed layout. This makes them behave like fullscreen apps.
| You can even make them literally fullscreen by removing borders
| and hiding the bar.
| mbrumlow wrote:
| I don't want my browser or video player covered up because I
| open a new program.
|
| I fail to see how resize is worse than not being able to see
| it.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I don't want my web browser or video player to be resized
| because I open a new program
|
| I suspect most tiling WM users don't either. I suspect most/all
| such WMs provide an option for this.
|
| I can speak only for Awesome WM. You can configure it so that
| certain applications don't tile. So if you want your media
| player to always be in floating mode, simply add that entry to
| your config.
|
| Alternatively, because you have multiple virtual workspaces,
| you can designate one or more of them to be in floating mode.
| Then every application in that workspace will be floating (i.e.
| you don't need to manually add them to your config).
|
| You can with a keystroke switch a given workspace into floating
| vs tiling mode.
|
| You can, with a keystroke, switch a given _application_ into
| floating mode - even if the workspace is in tiling mode.
|
| With Awesome, your virtual workspaces are not really
| workspaces, but "work configuration tags". So I can have
| Firefox in workspace 1, and xterm in workspace 2. In each one,
| they are maximized. Then if I ever need them in the same
| workspace, I can _add_ both of them to workspace 3. So now:
|
| Firefox is in both workspace 1 and workspace 3. xterm is in
| both workspace 2 and workspace 3.
|
| When I'm in workspace 1, I see only Firefox. When I'm in
| workspace 2, I see only xterm. When I'm in workspace 3, I see
| both (tiled).
|
| There are plenty of options. For me, it's the rare exception
| when I don't want a window tiled. And with a quick keystroke I
| switch it to floating mode.
|
| (For media players, I've configured them to always run full
| screen, so it doesn't matter how many other applications are
| tiled in that workspace).
| atiedebee wrote:
| Is that similar to how DWM does it? I heard some people
| complain that tricks like these are not compatible with some
| free desktop standard. I am not familiar with it though,
| which is why I am asking.
| sweeter wrote:
| The solution is as simple as using workspaces. On 1 I have my
| browser, on 2 I have my terminal and dev environment, and I
| just keep placing things down the line.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Yes but what do you do when you briefly need to look at
| your browser and your terminal at the same time? Say when
| you are following instructions.
| ihalip wrote:
| Terminator really is great, infinite scroll is what really sold
| it to me ~9 years ago and I've been a happy user ever since.
| exe34 wrote:
| On Xmonad, I have 9 workspaces - I open other things in
| different spaces from my web browser.
| d0mine wrote:
| Some people have issues with object permanence (if they don't
| see an object, they forget it exists).
|
| Sticky corners plus keyboard-driven tiling inside IDE (emacs),
| web browser (zen) can go a long way even without a formal
| tiling WM.
| kkfx wrote:
| EXWM user here, I have no issue with tiling mplayer or firefox,
| most of the time I simply use them full screen, if I open
| something aside flipping (mode-line-other-buffer) or anyway re-
| layouting my desktop is super-easy with proper keybindings to
| simple physical keys actions.
|
| Meanwhile I fail to see any reason to waste time moving
| floating windows, playing overlapping. I use floats for
| instance for GIMP, they do work enough, but that's is, the
| float problem is more a GUI concept problem where the GUI dev
| have designed something not flexible enough in most cases.
|
| You use a terminal, good, why you use menus on GUIs apps? It
| would not be much quicker the Ubuntu Unity HUD? Why having
| specific buttons instead of allowing typing/clicking text like
| in org-mode or Plan9 ACME editor? Why even menu bars instead of
| context menus? Do you really need to see let's say WYSIWYG
| office suite buttons all the time, wasting vertical screen
| space, for what? You want to make some text bold, you still
| have to select it, why having a B icons up there?
|
| Why even have a damn desktop with icons concept since every
| time you use an app you cover the icons? Why not simply have an
| initial screen/page/you-name-it easy to write like an org-mode
| note, composed of active contents, like the said note, with
| anything you want, including even a reminder quickly written
| during the previous desktop session? Personally I have a single
| key bound to a function bringing me the current day note, I can
| directly type some text, click on the unread mail link witch is
| also a single key if I want, see/click some other stuff etc,
| why in modern desktops hyper-simple things like damn write down
| a simple note demand going through a menu, find a relevant app,
| launch it, type the few words, save them etc etc etc? Why it's
| so damn hard to link an email in a note, a local pdf, an
| "action" that do something on my desktop, a small sexp that
| let's say switch my current "web desktop" to "daily todo"
| windows layout etc?
|
| The whole modern GUI concept down to the desktop is deeply
| flawed, born with the idea to make things easy for computer-
| illiterate imaging "the desktop" like a physical desk (try
| looking for General Magic systems) doing anything to mimics
| papers of that time, like "folders" (suspended folders, very
| popular when their visual concept was born) instead of
| directories (meaning list of files, because that's what they
| are) or even the concept of "single document file" where
| perhaps a note-app have no reason to store a file per note or
| even expose the user to the on-disk storage. Why even having a
| filesystem organized like a tree instead of a free graph? Yes,
| we need a starting point for the system, but the humans do not
| need it...
| wdkrnls wrote:
| As a tiling window manager user, I am really frustrated with
| mainstream web browsers. They are an ergonomic disaster for me,
| forcing me to use the mouse and waste so much precious screen
| real estate with gray space and redundant tabs. I want to
| disable tabs and just use windows managed by my window manager.
| That's what window managers are for! Separation of concerns is
| a pretty good notion in my book. Emacs can have a server and
| multiple "frames", so why can't Firefox or Chrome? Someone
| please tell me this is possible and I just missed it.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| With all due respect, I think that this is just the
| inevitable cost of swimming upstream. GUIs are designed,
| through and through, to be used with a mouse. Someone who
| wants to navigate purely with a keyboard just isn't part of
| the thought process when designing the UI of your browser.
| djaouen wrote:
| I like EXWM because it fits in with my continuing Emacs obsession
| lol
| big-green-man wrote:
| Hard disagree.
|
| I'm a Sway user and tiling wm evangelist, I absolutely do not
| want a suite of preinstalled software to come baked into my
| wm/compositor. I'm happy to install the software that I need.
|
| If someone wants to _distribute_ a complete Linux desktop with a
| tiling wm as default, that would be interesting, but a generic DE
| with a tiling wm to me seems like a waste of time.
| dicytea wrote:
| No one's saying that they should include a DE into Sway. Your
| precious WM will still be with you even if someone decides to
| make a new tiling DE.
|
| I'm a Hyprland user and honestly, cobbling together a poor
| man's DE using half-baked amateur-ish GTK apps and copy-pasting
| Nerd Font icons no longer spark any joy for me. I'm basically
| ready to jump at the first sight of a viable alternative. I'm
| very optimistic about Cosmic DE in this regards.
| subsection1h wrote:
| > _cobbling together a poor man 's DE using half-baked
| amateur-ish GTK apps_
|
| Do you think that GNOME's web browser (Epiphany?) and KDE's
| web browser (Konqueror?) are better than Firefox and
| Chromium?
|
| Do you think that GNOME Text Editor and KDE's text editor
| (Kate?) are better than Emacs?
| dicytea wrote:
| By DE, I'm mostly talking about having a cohesive graphical
| shell, not the random apps that comes pre-installed (who
| cares about those?).
|
| The login manager, lock screen, taskbar, notification
| daemon, launcher, OSD, workspace overview, etc. In WMs (or
| WM-like compositors), you either have to cobble all of this
| together yourself or just give up and convince yourself
| that you're a minimalist.
|
| Doing this kind of stuff was fun for a while, but these
| days I'm starting to crave for something _actually_ good
| and polished.
| leni536 wrote:
| I'm using KDE and I have neither Konqueror nor Kate
| installed. Those are very much optional, I don't consider
| them part of the DE.
| aledue wrote:
| I've recently installed (a maintained fork of) Krohnkite[0],
| a tiling WM for Plasma 6, and I'm happy with it so far after
| tweaking the key bindings.
|
| Things I miss:
|
| - a scratchpad;
|
| - toggling back and forth between desktops/workspaces with
| super+number (e.g. super+3 goes to desktop 3, but if I'm
| already on 3 I want to go back to the previous desktop);
|
| - I also miss a bit the "manual" tiling from i3/sway (where
| you can choose where the next split will be). Krohnkite is
| DWM-style with predefined layouts (two columns, spiral,
| monocle...).
|
| Maybe some of this can be done on Plasma/Krohnkite too (for
| the third I doubt but it's low priority), I haven't really
| looked into that.
|
| [0] https://github.com/anametologin/krohnkite/
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| I tried a pre-defined i3 with manjaro and I absolutely hated
| the experience. Tiling wms are very opinionated, and having it
| pre-installed means the typical ~/.config files are put
| elsewhere, with someone else's opinions, color schemes, etc.
|
| It takes longer to undo it than to start fresh.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I actually like using a DE over sway because it builds in a
| sane set of defaults for everything.
|
| Like yeah I could spend hours of my life trying to configure
| sway and waybar to my liking while getting some wayland
| compatible version of redshift going, or, I could just use
| popOs's gnome and get on with my life.
|
| I used to love to fiddle with all those things when I was
| younger, and I used to hang out on r/unixporn and appreciate
| all the cool WMs, but at some point I realized I just wanted a
| working desktop that got out of my way and let me code.
| badgersnake wrote:
| Same, but if a DE fixed a few things I would be happy.
|
| * Make it work with a graphical login * Make screen sharing
| work out the box without having to set env vars and faff with
| xdg-desktop-portal * xdg-desktop-portal generally, the -wlr
| version doesn't implement some things which means you have to
| have a fallback * desktop notifications out of the box.
| autarchprinceps wrote:
| "We need more desktop environments" - Nooo, absolutely not. You
| need one or maybe two good ones, and it can have tiling as a
| feature or at worst plugin. The fragmentation and lack of key
| features and stability testing as a result is already a major
| reason for people not to adopt Linux desktops. And even if we
| don't consolidate, there is already an idiotic amount of just
| different tiling desktop environments, let alone all desktop
| environments. What on earth do you want even more for? Just add
| features to existing ones, so that everybody benefits.
| Competition isn't really needed in open source, since you can
| just add all of the things to one shared solution. Imagine if
| everybody suggested making a brand new kernel for each
| combination of hardware, or the likes.
| ebiester wrote:
| If only Gnome was amenable to features... They are a very
| opinionated group.
| bradrn wrote:
| For a while I used XMonad (as a window manager) together with
| Xfce (as a desktop environment). It had its rough edges, but I
| really liked the experience. I could easily fit my windows on the
| screen the way I wanted to, while still getting the integration
| of a well-designed desktop environment.
|
| Alas, I had to drop this setup on moving to Wayland. And I can't
| get it back easily, because Wayland compositors generally don't
| allow for their window managers to be swapped out. I now use Sway
| WM, which is perfectly acceptable... but I still miss my tiling
| desktop environment.
| delichon wrote:
| I'm a long time Ubuntu user but not exactly a power user. When I
| installed i3wm I really liked it but was very handicapped by
| losing the rest of Gnome. I didn't understand how much "windows
| manager" encompasses. Suddenly just finding an app and opening it
| was pain. I ended up getting rid of it because of the constant
| challenges of replacing this and that from Gnome, but I still
| miss the tiling desktop. Is there anything out there for those us
| who need more hand holding?
| dingnuts wrote:
| it's been a few years since I've done this, but I used to have
| the same problem as you and I found that if I ran MATE but
| replaced the default WM in it, Marco, with i3, I got to have my
| tiling WM inside a proper DE. It was really great! If you are
| interested there are a few guides you can find if you search.
| I'm certainly not the first or only person to do this.
|
| I only stopped using it because I eventually got a very large
| screen and tiling doesn't fit my flow anymore, so I just use
| KDE now lol
| tacone wrote:
| Wow, do you have any link with instructions explaining how to
| do that?
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| increasingly it's not that I need or desire any more features,
| but shit simply doesnt work if I dont bootstrap my window manager
| with a service layer desktop environment. My xinitrc includes
| sillyness to get KDE, gnome, dbus, systray icons to all work
| juuust right.
|
| If you use KDE+i3 as the WM, none of those problems exist.
|
| So its more like, other apps expect certain things to work in a
| certain way so make sure you get all the ducks lined up and then
| youll be good to go
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| https://github.com/leukipp/cortile
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I read the blog post as "everything's fine".
|
| Tiling window managers are a niche, wanting to integrate them
| into a desktop environment is even more so, and the article
| mentions no less than 3 options for doing it.
|
| For me, that's really good for a niche.
|
| Personally, I am a lot more worried about the X11/Wayland
| situation, with the former being more or less deprecated, and the
| latter still having issues after all these years, and compositors
| and therefore window managers being a common point of issue.
| Gormo wrote:
| > with the former being more or less deprecated
|
| Nah, it's not. That's just wishful thinking by Wayland
| acolytes.
| gabrielgio wrote:
| It is not wishful thinking from acolytes, it is development
| effort from the freedesktop group. Most of the effort it is
| now target wayland.
|
| X11 is not deprecated yet but probably won't get many new
| features (e.g. HDR).
| Retr0id wrote:
| IMHO, a better taxonomy for WMs (and DEs) is "keyboard-centric"
| vs "mouse-centric" vs "trackpad-centric" (and "touchscreen-
| centric", but we don't talk about those). Of course you can have
| all of them at once, but there will always be compromises.
| whatever1 wrote:
| When I touch the mouse I need to have access to UI that lets me
| manage my desktop with the pointer. When I am not using the
| mouse why clutter the screen with unnecessary UI? Same if the
| system detects that I am about to use my thumb to touch the
| screen.
|
| I think the UI should adapt to the user inputs instead of
| trying to dictate to the user how to work.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I also think that such UI will be unnecessary, unless it
| displays something that you might want to see even if you are
| not touching it. Most commands can be entered by keyboard,
| including many commands for window management; some can use
| the keyboard and mouse together (e.g. to manually change the
| position and/or size of a window).
|
| However, sometimes it may be helpful to display status
| indicators, e.g. if you have both tiled and floating windows,
| it can help to display an indicator for this. Also, an
| operating system design might involve capabilities, and the
| status of these capabilities (e.g. audio, network,
| automation, etc) might also be displayed as window indicators
| that the user can adjust (mute, redirect, etc).
| aidenn0 wrote:
| KDE will let you configure keyboard shortcuts for darn-near
| every WM thing you might want to do. Only a fraction have
| default shortcuts, but they are still pretty useful.
|
| Example:
|
| Hit Ctrl-F10, type part of the title of a window, use the
| arrow-keys to pick the one you want.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I think it would help to be designed to be usable by the
| keyboard alone but also to be usable by the combination of
| keyboard and mouse, and to work well either way, and you can do
| both together if you want to do (they are not different modes
| so you do not need to switch the mode).
|
| Microsoft Windows has some of that; you can push ALT+SPACE and
| use the menu for move and resize by the arrows, but you can
| also use the mouse to move/size windows. Microsoft is not the
| best way, but this specific example is one of the things that
| can be done.
|
| I also think that multiple document interface and tabbed
| windows could also be implemented in the window manager, that
| would not need to be the features of specific programs such as
| a web browser. (Some additional commands for application
| programs to interact with the window manager would be helpful;
| a window was created by another one, and is a part of the same
| program as this one, and some application commands are not
| specific to this window (but sometimes the user might want to
| start a separate instance for some windows anyways), etc.)
| gabrielgio wrote:
| > but they sacrifice the full-featured nature of a desktop
| environment.
|
| _For me_ it is not a sacrifice, it is conscious choice. I have
| everything on the tip of my finger and have all (or most) of my
| config done in a single file, I don't need a heavier DE for no
| benefit.
|
| > increased control over their workspaces and the ability to
| customize their desktop...
|
| Is it even achievable? I don't think you can't have the full-
| featured nature of gnome and the control of sway. They have
| antagonistic design. For example, on sway you set up your
| workflow by composing a lot of software together (with things
| like wofi, mako etc), while on gnome it is already a cohesive
| package with everything you need already in place (and trying to
| change that is uphill battle).
|
| Also if the author allow me, the text is quite prolix, you say
| the same thing over and over again without providing any concrete
| example.
|
| > there is a limited number of desktop environments that offer
| non-traditional (MS Windows-like) window management.
|
| Like what? From those DE you have listed what are they missing?
| Why do you need more?
| sam0x17 wrote:
| These tiling environments are great when you can just drag
| corners with your mouse to change the size of regions. When that
| isn't a feature, I find it isn't very usable for me at least
| skgough wrote:
| One feature of i3 and friends that I really relied on when I was
| using a laptop as my main computer was the tab mode. Being able
| to tab between windows on half of your screen while keeping your
| browser open in the other half was extremely useful.
|
| I know BeOS had tabbed windows in the 90s in a floating window
| manager; it makes me wonder why this idea didn't catch on in the
| early 2000s.
|
| Windows has started to add tabs to individual programs
| incrementally as part of their rewrites of core applications in
| the new GUI frameworks. Notepad got tabs and so did Explorer. So
| they see the utility.
|
| Why hasn't tabbing been included as a core feature of the window
| manager outside of these niche tiling window managers for Linux?
| solomonb wrote:
| You can do tabbed windows in XMonad.
| colordrops wrote:
| There currently is no tiling window manager that does all of
| these things, and it's driving me crazy
|
| * native tiling (not scripted on top like gnome or kde
| extensions)
|
| * Wayland-based
|
| * ability to disable xwayland scaling
|
| * screen sharing + window sharing
|
| * Good multimonitor support
|
| * doesn't crash 3 times a day
| boring_twenties wrote:
| Xmonad integrates nicely with xfce and MATE, at least. Probably
| KDE as well.
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| I'm still on X because there is no sane way to run a tiling
| window manager in Wayland using proprietary Nvidia drivers. Sucks
| because Hyprland is pretty cool, but I am not willing to put up
| with whatever stupid bullshit is necessary to use it and have
| access to CUDA.
| benterix wrote:
| Am I the only one who gets mildly annoyed by the plural in the
| title? Singular would be just fine - true, precise, without any
| vague implications.
| dabber21 wrote:
| Didn't Gnome want to do add tiling?
|
| https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2023/07/26/rethinking-windo...
|
| (hn link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36880235)
|
| whatever happened to it
| TrevorFSmith wrote:
| Fedora has a Sway spin that installs all of the usual applets
| like volume and network config. Sway can also be installed on any
| Fedora machine with one dnf command. I just don't have the
| problems described in the article.
| perakojotgenije wrote:
| Quicktile: https://github.com/ssokolow/quicktile
|
| https://ssokolow.com/quicktile/
|
| Nobody is mentioning it but it is such a great tiling manager, I
| use it all the time. Just select the window with alt-tab and then
| tile the windows with Ctrl+alt+numeric keyboards. It's quick and
| it doesn't need a mouse to tile windows. And it can integrate
| into any x11 windows manager.
| mgaunard wrote:
| The main applications that I use are a web browser, a terminal,
| and a text editor.
|
| Both my terminal and my text editor support tiling natively, and
| I assume there are extensions for my web browser to do the same.
|
| I'm not sure adding this complexity at the window manager level
| is really that useful.
| Animats wrote:
| I would settle for console windows having a border. I hate that
| on Ubuntu, when two console windows overlap, there's no visible
| boundary. That's just stupid.
| gigatexal wrote:
| They exist. It's the one and only reason I use Linux is I fell in
| love with i3 and now Sway.
|
| They're not just good for terminals. I do like me some tmux but I
| find tiling and stacking and all the glory of a titling window
| manager the best part of desktop Linux.
| supercheetah wrote:
| I would say those aren't really desktop environments. They
| provide the bare minimum for window management and compositing,
| but not much more. Desktop environments encompass much more
| than that, like managing file type associations, and protocol
| handling.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Some users might need that. And even expect it. I don't need
| it. I know the tools to open the file types or XDG is
| configured with default apps.
| evnix wrote:
| If your desktop environment requires me to click twice instead of
| once to switch or choose between two instances of chrome. Then I
| know you only care about the cool factor and is not going to be a
| great UX.
|
| Stop asking me to use alt+tab and cycle through windows like a
| caveman or ask me to setup workspaces like its 1980.
|
| "Stinky smelly nerds" seem to forget about large touch screen
| monitors and VR devices and that all icons can fit in one stretch
| of wide screens.
| taeric wrote:
| I like tiling well enough. What surprises me is that I don't have
| an easy way to script different window setups. Would love to be
| able to press a function key and have it put specific windows on
| my various monitors, with overflow placed on a new desktop.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| PaperWM https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM is very neat and I've
| been using it for a while
| qwertox wrote:
| I like it how it is on Windows 11, with 6 zones (tl-l-bl and tr-
| r-br, where t=top, l=left, and top and bottom target that quarter
| of the monitor while the middle targets the entire height of that
| side) and maximize/unmaximize windows by dragging the title bar
| to the center top of the monitor.
|
| Then, in addition to this, with Actual Window Manager, map two
| layouts (2|2, 3|3, so 4 "panes" or 6 panes) via shortcuts where
| the dragging of the title bar shows these panes as targets for
| the window to pull it in when pressing shift at the same time.
| And with Ctrl-Shift Z or X I select one of the two layouts.
|
| The 2|2 and 3|3 layouts are useful if I want a grid of terminal
| windows on the monitor while Windows's native features are good
| to move windows around quickly.
|
| The benefit of having multiple terminal windows in a grid vs one
| tiled terminal is that I can pin selected terminals to the
| foreground.
|
| I wouldn't want a desktop environment to generate layouts
| automatically for me, unless it can see what I'm doing and ask me
| if it should switched to a layout it proposes to me through a
| preview image on the display.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Mnyeah, for me the Windows 10 tiling was just right. In Windows
| 11 it's way too fiddly. Like every time I tile a window say to
| the left half of the screen (WIN + <-) it brings up every other
| window as an option to tile to the right half _even if I
| already have a window tiled there_.
|
| There's other fiddlyness but I can't be bothered now. I need to
| make a list so I can kvetch properly about it, with bullet
| points and all. And references.
|
| But overall I'm sorry to say even Win 11 is still better at
| tiling windows than almost anything I've tried on Linux (I had
| Xmonad on a laptop way back when and that was actually quite
| good). Though of course there's always text mode with Midnight
| Commander so :P
| jethronethro wrote:
| Need? Or is is simply a matter of some people just wanting them?
| MainlyMortal wrote:
| I think what most people, including tiling people, would actually
| want without realising it is Divvy (macOS)/gTile
| (gnome)/PowerToys (Windows).
|
| A regular floating window manager but you can move any floating
| window into a tiled window based on a grid of potential
| locations.
|
| It's hard to explain in words but look any of them up and it's
| the best no-compromise solution for everyone.
| DrDeadCrash wrote:
| I can confirm for power toys on Windows, I find it essential
| for making use of multiple 4k screens.
| MainlyMortal wrote:
| It's honestly the best of the lot but slept on in these parts
| because of being Windows only. KDE started to clone this as a
| native feature but it seems to be abandoned. Story of linux I
| guess.
|
| I really, really can't recommend PowerToys enough.
| amarant wrote:
| Not so! I'm sure they're great for a bunch of usecases but they
| don't fit mine, which tbf is probably not very common.
|
| I've got an ultrawide monitor, 32:9 aspect ratio, and I like to
| have three columns, with the middle one being basically 16:9,
| and the right being fairly narrow, so that the left can be
| somewhere perhaps slightly wider than 4:3.
|
| Regular tiling positions aren't flexible enough for that
| zamalek wrote:
| I agree to an extent. Very often people/users ask for things
| based on what they know because it's hard to imagine what they
| need. Solving that's really the essence of UX/product management.
| I don't think a tiling DE is what is needed. Based on my
| experience, there are some core issues to resolve here:
|
| * The notion of a running apps area (dock, taskbar) seems to be
| essential for users.
|
| * Users (myself and people I know) typically have one application
| maximized at a time. The exception would be when cross-app
| interaction is required (drag and drop) or when it really makes
| sense to have multiple apps visible at once (terminal + editor).
|
| * When users have multiple apps open, there's typically a pattern
| to how they accomplish this.
|
| * Virtual desktops are hard. You have to dedicate
| congition/memory to what is running on which desktop.
|
| * Most users don't want to spend hours learning+editing config
| files to get something basic working (i.e. the article is
| definitely correct about having a DE vs WM here).
|
| I consider something along the lines of this to solve all the
| above:
|
| * Typical DE goodies.
|
| * An infinite canvas, not virtual desktops.
|
| * Presets for window placement, i.e. fancy zones[1] that can be
| placed anywhere on the infinite canvas.
|
| * The camera (current view rectangle) can be translated and
| scaled/zoomed. Zooming would effectively be alt+tab.
|
| * Camera position presets - these would be analogous to virtual
| desktops. They can be any shape or size, and can overlap. The
| idea here is that you could have one camera focusing on your
| editor fancy zone, and another focusing on the editor+terminal.
|
| [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon...
| kkfx wrote:
| We do have some tiling WM, not DE ok, but still enough. Casual
| users who want DEs are typically former Windows users who have no
| idea about tiling concept and current sorry state of GNU/Linux
| DEs it's definitively not good to teach anyone anything except
| instability, arrogance etc. Bold terms, I know, but the right
| terms IMVHO when we talk about Gnome or Kde DEs now.
|
| Tiling is VERY good for a PROPER desktop, but actually we miss a
| proper desktop for the masses, we have Emacs/EXWM, but most
| X11-based apps can't be sane, proper desktop apps being simply
| widget based or WebVM-based apps. A proper desktop app is
| something easy to bend by the user, flexible, automatable, not a
| rigid tool where the user can't do much more than clicking around
| and have only cut/copy/paste IPCs and even very limited.
| lsh0 wrote:
| notion, the fork of ion3:
|
| https://notionwm.net
|
| https://github.com/raboof/notion
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