feel free to list other window managers you’ve used.
I have been happy with bspwm, but considering trying something else. I love its simplicity and immense customizability. I like that it is shell scriptable, but it is not a deal breaker feature for me.
I like how the binary split model makes any custom partition possible.
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Not sure if this counts as a tiling window manager, but I spend most of my time in emacs in full screen mode. I can create, delete, resize, and swap my windows.
Are you aware that Emacs can be a full-featured window manager.
That’s what made me start using EXWM (Emacs X Window Manager). With Emacs you end up managing “windows” (that outside Emacs would be called “panes”). With EXWM Emacs really is your desktop, and X applications run inside its windows. So that meant I no longer had two windowing models to manage (Emacs and WM), just one. There was a lot to like about that.
But… Emacs as a window manager, and using your development environment as your window manager, has other issues. Especially restarting it becomes more onerous. So I went back to i3 and am very happy. With a few minor customizations I can integrate Emacs and i3 very comfortably.
But another Emacs point vis-à-vis window managers is many committed Emacs users, require only trivial functionality from our window managers. I usually have a web browser and an Emacs window and that’s it, with occasionally something else running. I was pretty happy with Unity with crude tiling where I could split a conventional WM’s screen into two.
The main reason I use i3 is it gives me access to easy customization and has a windowing model I can work with, and one day I should be able to migrate to sway on Wayland without much drama.
I’m not sure my solution counts either - I just use quicktile with default KDE, because it has the tiling bits that I need and the config file was simple enough that I didn’t have to spend a whole day setting it up. I need working memory for other things besides keyboard shortcuts.
HYPRLAND !
Need to figure out making it work with nvidia 😭
Works fine here. I migrated from Sway to Hyprland and it just worked. For Sway I had to work around some frustrating niggles but nothing so far for Hyprland. I use a MSI laptop with a 2070Maxq hybrid graphics setup. The performance of Wolfenstein New Order shows the nvidia is working ;-)
I don’t have any problem with hyprland on Nvidia, I didn’t have to tweak anything, it worked out of the box, I just installed it on Archcraft.
Here are my dot files https://github.com/visnudeva/dot-files
i3 all the way
Sorry to be the boring i3 user but it’s a rock solid TWM. Plus I am using the autotiling mod and now it’s even better :D
This is the way.
i3 aswell, its great.
Starting with i3 as my first, i tried a bunch of different ones. Xmonad and Qtile were the ones i liked the most but Qtile was buggy and Xmonad while working was super confusing to configure with haskell.
Also tried AwesomeWM, it felt a bit buggy to me in terms of window handling and DWM was just too complicated to patch and even with patches it was too basic
Ended up going back to i3, and then moved over to Sway.
DWM
You’ll like Sway when you decide to make the Wayland transition.
i3 and sway
i3 until the day I die
Edit: Why? Because I love how easy it is to get working, it’s a nice balance between features and simplicity for me, and IPC features are great for some QoL plugins. Its configuration file format is simple enough, I like lua with wezterm and neovim but I don’t really see the point with a WM, I just need to see my windows when I want, the way I want, and to switch to others.
Can you list some QoL mods for i3? I have been using autotiling for the last few months and it’s great.
I too would be interested to know what plugins you use.
I love i3 and have used it for years and find myself fruitlessly using the most common keybinds in windows at work.
But my gripes over i3 are:
- If I don’t know the name of the command, say a specific settings window, etc - then I’m hosed if I need it.
- It doesn’t come with a lock screen by default, you need a plugin for it
Here’s a list of plugins that may be useful:
- kitti3: quake style dropdown terminal
- tdrop: the same as kitti3, but I moved to wezterm due to kitty’s design choice and tdrop fits the bill, it’s also wm agnostic.
- i3-volume: integrates with dunst for me to pop up volume status when I change volume via keybinds.
- autotiling: A must have in my opinion. I seldom have more than 2 windows on a monitor, since I have two monitors and utilize other workspace, but there are times when I temporarily have multiple windows open and too lazy to group them into stacks or tabs.
- i3expo: I heard people have success with this as an alt-tabber with visualization. I just use dmenu and have scripts for window switching.
- wmfocus: quite useful if you have multiple monitors and multiple windows on each, instead of doing Super + h a few times to move to the left most window, I just use wmfocus and hop to it immediately.
- i3-extras: I just found this, perhaps it’s of use.
Regarding your gripe #1, I don’t quite understand? Do you mean you don’t know the command of a program to type into your terminal to launch?
And gripe #2, if you mean i3lock, I’m okay with that, I like that i3 follows UNIX philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well, and because of that good i3lock forks exist! If it was baked into i3 then this might not be the case.
For i3-lock, I currently use i3lock-fancy-rapid, it’s a weird name lol, but it is still dependent on the i3lock-color binary, which itself is a fork of i3lock.
XMonad. Been using it for almost a decade, and very powerful. I3 I hear is also good.
I prefer the way XMonad handles multimonitor workspaces, but left for Sway due to wayland support.
need to give it a try. I’m stuck in the past times lol
Same here, but I’m about ready to accept Wayland… Seems like sway is the best option?
Sway is more of an i3 clone. I used to use xmonad, but recently I have been using river with wayland. It has similar defaults to xmonad, also being a dwm clone
Sway with
autotilingand a few nifty scripts (launch or focus and such) and Waybar. The combination of having scratchpads, sensible autotiling along with titlebars and the wonderful world of wayland is supreme.I really like dwm. It doesn’t seem too popular so maybe the other ones are better but it was the first one I tried so the others feel weird to me. I like the idea behind suckless in general though.
i3 is what I’ve been using the past few years. I’ve tried others, but I always end back up with i3 as I’ve found nothing else to be as simple and efficient for my workflow, with 12 workspaces across 2 monitors.
I usually use tiling add-ons for Gnome or KDE. So pop-shell or bismuth.
Pop!_OS 20.04 LTS… I love how it combines tiling and stacking. Sure I could use workspaces instead of stacks, but with stacks… I can use both!
I’ve also used EXWM and am going to give it another whirl after I upgrade to emacs 28 with native comp
Does this support independent workspaces on each monitor? That’s what kept me from using i3 on Plasma :(
I’m on Hyprland (wayland compositer, wl-roots based). Prior to the wayland transition I was on dwm. Hyprland offers a dynamic tiling layout just like dwm, which was my main selling point. The dev is very active and hyprland is gaining maturity rapidly (more than alternatives like dwl or river did at the time I checked it out). I also tried i3 and sway, but they don’t quite cut it for me as they don’t do dynamic tiling out of the box.
I wish Hyprland gets into the Fedora repos. I don’t wanna have to deal with building stuff.
@cyclohexane for me it was and always will be bspwm. Once I had it configured it was the coziest of cozies.
