7 ms·

Komorebi works pretty well. In the end, I felt like it's limitations were mostly at the OS level rather than the fault of the software itself (similar to tiling

by extr 4y ago

Komorebi works pretty well. In the end, I felt like it's limitations were mostly at the OS level rather than the fault of the software itself (similar to tiling WM on MacOs). I think for such a thing to really work, virtual desktops need to be a first class feature of the desktop environment. For Windows/Mac, they're still kind of janky. Whereas on Linux, I can bind Win+Tab to "Previous Desktop", hold down the button, and watch the screen flick between almost as fast as the refresh rate of the monitor. It really makes a laptop, with a small screen and with no additional monitors, a high productivity environment. Which is too bad, because the REST of Linux really sucks for laptops, with all the hardware-specific tweaks needed.

bsnnkv 4y ago
I really appreciate this comment, I think it is spot on. The official Win32 API for interacting with Virtual Desktops[1] is severely (deliberately?) lacking. There are some brave souls who are constantly reverse-engineering and figuring out how to interact with Virtual Desktops in all the ways that are missing from the official Win32 API, but this is a constant game of whack-a-mole because you never know when an update to Windows is going to break everything.[2] If anyone working on the Virtual Desktops feature at Windows reads this: please give us a real, stable API for Virtual Desktops to develop against. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/shobjidl_core/nn-shobjidl_core-ivirtualdesktopmanager https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/shobjidl... [2] https://github.com/MScholtes/VirtualDesktop/issues/35 https://github.com/MScholtes/VirtualDesktop/issues/35
- runjake 4y ago
  I’m on mobile but there’s a preference to set the animation delay for the macOS virtual desktop switching to zero and it’ll basically run as fast or at least look as fast as Linux switching.
  - grncdr 4y ago
    There was, but I don’t think it’s worked for a while now. Maybe there’s a new one somewhere?
  - veidr 4y ago
    I think that is gone, as are many of the old ones like NSWindowResizeTime (or similar) that made lots of the OS animations bearable (i.e., made them not happen).
  - extr 4y ago
    There is, and such a tweak is available with the yabai tiling WM, but it requires disabling SIP. Which unfortunately is not something I can do on my work laptop. It's unfortunately because this small tweak would move the tiling WM experience on Mac a LOT closer to the linux SOTA.
- extr 4y ago
  Thank you for your hard work on Komorebi. I have been following the project for some time and we've crossed paths in comment sections before. I use a Mac at work now or I would still be using it. You're fighting the good fight for tiling WM enthusiasts everywhere!
orev 4y ago
In Windows 10 and 11, after you create another virtual desktop, you can easily move between them with built-in Win+Ctrl+Left/Right Arrow. It may not be as perfectly tuned as many would like, but it works well enough.
- timeon 4y ago
  In case of macbook there are probably shortcuts but trackpad is convenient.
  - least 4y ago
    On MacOS you can assign your own shortcuts to switch to specific desktops as well, instead of having to go through each of them individually. Under Keyboard => Shortcuts => Mission Control it give you an option to assign hotkeys for them. I believe the default shortcuts to move left or right a space is ⌃← and ⌃→.
- fjfbsufhdvfy 4y ago
  You can disable the switch animation, which makes it much nicer to use. Just instantly changes the content on all your monitors then. It even works with fullscreen applications on different desktops...
  - vladvasiliu 4y ago
    How do you do that? I've noticed animations seem to be quicker in the win11 22h2 update, which makes them much less annoying, but I still prefer the instant change of i3.
  - least 4y ago
    Yep, under Accessibility => Display => Toggle the Reduce motion button. It is much better but still not instant. The only way I'm aware of how to make it instantaneous is by disabling SIP and using Yabai [1]. [1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai
    - 4y ago
least 4y ago
Only fairly recently has Linux really seen much development of tiling WMs on top of things like Gnome and KDE. I know some of them can be run on top of XFCE and have for a while, but all of them fell similarly janky to ones on MacOS. It's only once you adopt something like i3, dwm, awesome, bspwm, xmonad, etc. that you get something that works as you'd hope in terms of spaces and tiling behavior. The problem is that those window managers (in my opinion) is that they fail to do the basics well. You have to find the individual components like the bar if the WM comes with it and write your own scripts or hopefully find one that someone else wrote to get the things that are built into Gnome and KDE and work out of the box. You gotta set up your own notifications daemon. You need to configure how to launch applications through something like rofi or by configuring keybinds in your config. You need to configure your login windows. It can be enjoyable to a point but it can also just become really frustrating to deal with. I think PopOS' tiling WM built on top of Gnome is pretty good but Gnome itself is frustrating trying to configure. KDE is highly configurable but its base configuration/experience is worse than Gnome. The closest I've gotten to something that does both is replacing xfce's xfwm with i3 but ultimately it can easily break since it depends on turning off xfwm in sessions and making i3 an autolaunch item. Linux is obviously the best for tiling WMs, but they have their own set of issues that traditional WMs on popular DEs in linux don't. Windows and MacOS have even more issues when attempting to implement them. I feel like there's just no winning here, regardless of what OS you're using.
- bbertelsen 4y ago
  The experience with the PopOS related pop shell is an honourable mention here with reasonable key defaults. You should try it if you haven't already, it's quite good.
  - least 4y ago
    I did mention that I tried it. The issue is less with the extension and more with dealing with Gnome. I think Gnome has sane defaults and works pretty well for a lot of people but the problem is that the second you want to change something it fights you and Gnome has gotten increasingly hostile towards user customization with each release. I think another issue might have been with setting keybinds with hyper and meh is problematic but it's been a while since I've used Gnome.
bscphil 4y ago
> the REST of Linux really sucks for laptops, with all the hardware-specific tweaks needed Just to state the obvious, "hardware-specific tweaks" are hardware-specific. It is not hard, these days, to buy hardware where everything just works out of the box. It doesn't make sense to say that in general Linux sucks for laptops when what you're complaining about is a problem caused by your hardware.
- blondin 4y ago
  i bought a laptop from a linux-first company. a laptop designed for linux, with custom hardware and OS and all. i feel very miserable using it. my solace is that it is not my main device. on this very day, i had to disable tap-to-click on the trackpad. so no, comments like the above are true. i would not recommend a linux laptop to anyone. the used Thinkpad and Dell folks are the exceptions, not the norm.
  - cookiengineer 4y ago
    Maybe you have issues with the synaptics driver? In case you do, I wrote an in-depth configuration guide for it a while ago [1]. Maybe this helps? [1] https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/synaptics-touchpad-on-linux.html https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/synaptics-touchpad-o...
    - eitland 4y ago
      Added to my pinboard.in (For everyone who thinks this is because Linux has much problems: I had no serious problems with the touchpad in my first 20 years but I hear it is a thing so I expect to see it sooner or later ;-)
  - bscphil 4y ago
    Shrug the last laptop we purchased was a boring Dell Inspiron. Wiped Windows and put Arch Linux on it the day we got it without even checking any compatibility stuff. Everything worked out of the box, nothing has ever needed to be configured or crashed. This is 11th gen Intel, nothing old.
eyelidlessness 4y ago
I haven’t used a Linux desktop environment for many years now, so maybe there’s some nuance I’m not understanding, but virtual desktops have been a first class part of the macOS UI for many years. Swiping between them is only delayed by the default animation speed of that aspect of the window manager, and generally meant to match trackpad gestures and provide inertia consistent with other gestures. Trying to understand how this relates to a tiling WM, I’m wondering if the virtual desktop in dedicated tiling WMs concept goes beyond multiple instances of the display and has arbitrary widths (or single dimension spaces)? That does sound nice for some ways I’d want a tiling WM, but it’s not what I’ve previously thought I’d want in one where I might have a grid with non-uniform x/y divisions. Like it sounds very confusing to have a layout such as: a a b b c a a b b c a a d d e And to treat anything besides `a` as a “desktop” even if they’re variable width.
- riquito 4y ago
  As an example, afaik, fullscreen apps create something else, like a temporary virtual desktop, and you can't assign keybindings to those since they are transient. The default animation is also a dealbraker if you plan on switching continuously desktop
  - eyelidlessness 4y ago
    I also don’t like either the animation speed or the default full screen behavior. You can configure the animations to be much faster, and use opt+click for a normal full screen window. These are design decisions I don’t prefer, but they definitely don’t suggest virtual desktops aren’t a first class consideration. They’re a first class consideration which don’t match our preferences, sure.
- cookiengineer 4y ago
  The point why i3 / sway on Linux are used so much is not that they have a specific layouting concept. It's because they let the user decide what layout and how many virtual desktops they need. I usually have 10+ virtual desktops, because I use 3 screens, and each of them has a different set of virtual desktops - which are also not bound to a specific screen and can be moved to another screen just as easily. If I need a new virtual desktop on the fly, I just create one without any repercussions for the rest of the layout (or stack). And I think that's the key concept of tiling WMs: user choice. On MacOS and Windows, on the other hand, I don't see a chance of this working anyhow. The virtual desktops there are usually just a single stack behind the scenes, and they are not per screen, so working with those platforms and expensive window manager tools has been always a pain for me. The fullscreen mode of Apps alone is just so botched, no way this is gonna work failsafe with a third-party window manager that is reverse engineering the unofficial, breaking, APIs.
darthrupert 4y ago
Anecdote: my gaming laptop from 2022 doesn't work on Windows 10/11. It keeps hard crashing when stressed. On Linux, it's totally stable on identical workloads. Personally, I don't see reason anymore for the existence of Windows. For a long time it held its ground as a gaming OS, but Steam/Proton has taken that final advantage from it.
- frzen 4y ago
  Is it an Alienware? From experience they have an unstable overclock from the factory which is applied by software not in the bios. I was pulling my hair out trying to diagnose crashes on a laptop for someone else. A bonus is if you install docker or WSL, the alienware control software could no longer turn off the overclock. So that whole time I thought there was no way it was overclocked because the option to overclock wasn't even visible in their software. it was a 2022 Alienware with a 12900k 64GB ddr5 and a 3080ti
  - darthrupert 4y ago
    >Is it an Alienware? Asus Zephyr G14 with AMD insides. Could be that they are indeed overclocking it for some reason. I didn't seem to get it to be 100% stable even with removing some boosts et al. But that doesn't matter. On Linux I don't have to tweak anything, it just works. Which is amusing.
suslik 4y ago
It is surprising to me that this and some of the subsequent comments view the state of tiling WMs on Mac unfavourably. I run i3gaps on my personal GNU/Linux machine and yabai with skhd at work, and both work equally fine in my experience (of course, it may as well be that my workflow does not rely on some critical piece of functionality that is not available for yabai).
Igrom 4y ago
>Whereas on Linux, I can bind Win+Tab to "Previous Desktop", hold down the button, and watch the screen flick between almost as fast as the refresh rate of the monitor. It really makes a laptop, with a small screen and with no additional monitors, a high productivity environment. In my opinion, you have right there concisely expressed the real differentiator of using a Linux tiling WM. While I understand that there exist numerous incentives for adding animations to graphical user interfaces, such as increased consumer appeal and furnishing the computer program with a time interval in which it can (re)load data, I would also like user interface designers to consider that for some, speed really is paramount, really is second to nothing, and then that those would like to opt out of animations. I care not if the GUI freezes for half a second when switching into a different context, as long as it's lower than the one-second baseline delay introduced by the designer. This becomes so much more important when dealing with the operating system --- it's in use all the time, and the time spent waiting in it compounds and throws one off! It's the "No Child Left Behind", but for GUIs --- let's file down peak performance in order to obtain a more uniform result. On Linux using i3, swapping your workspace costs exactly nothing. I often find myself rapidly and repeatedly switching to-and-fro between any two of them, as if I were performing a trill on a musical instrument, whenever I want to compare the output of two applications. The WM is my personal concierge there. In Mac OS, it feels like I'm stuck waiting in a crowded queue at the post office when there's only one tired and miserable worker around.
- extr 4y ago
  Yes, I agree, it really does come down to the animation speed. If you could disable animations, MacOS would almost work as well as Linux, since you can natively bind hotkeys to almost everything supported in i3/bspwm type environments. But it's just slow. And there is no reason for it. In fact there is even a bug right now in MacOS where switching between desktops using 3 finger swipe is actually SLOWER using ProMotion than at 60Hz. And if you switch desktops using keyboard hotkeys, it's faster than either of those two. Completely absurd. It's been that way for at least a year and they haven't bothered to fix it.

by extr 4y ago

bsnnkv 4y ago

I really appreciate this comment, I think it is spot on. The official Win32 API for interacting with Virtual Desktops[1] is severely (deliberately?) lacking. There are some brave souls who are constantly reverse-engineering and figuring out how to interact with Virtual Desktops in all the ways that are missing from the official Win32 API, but this is a constant game of whack-a-mole because you never know when an update to Windows is going to break everything.[2] If anyone working on the Virtual Desktops feature at Windows reads this: please give us a real, stable API for Virtual Desktops to develop against. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/shobjidl_core/nn-shobjidl_core-ivirtualdesktopmanager https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/shobjidl... [2] https://github.com/MScholtes/VirtualDesktop/issues/35 https://github.com/MScholtes/VirtualDesktop/issues/35

runjake 4y ago
I’m on mobile but there’s a preference to set the animation delay for the macOS virtual desktop switching to zero and it’ll basically run as fast or at least look as fast as Linux switching.
- grncdr 4y ago
  There was, but I don’t think it’s worked for a while now. Maybe there’s a new one somewhere?
- veidr 4y ago
  I think that is gone, as are many of the old ones like NSWindowResizeTime (or similar) that made lots of the OS animations bearable (i.e., made them not happen).
- extr 4y ago
  There is, and such a tweak is available with the yabai tiling WM, but it requires disabling SIP. Which unfortunately is not something I can do on my work laptop. It's unfortunately because this small tweak would move the tiling WM experience on Mac a LOT closer to the linux SOTA.
extr 4y ago
Thank you for your hard work on Komorebi. I have been following the project for some time and we've crossed paths in comment sections before. I use a Mac at work now or I would still be using it. You're fighting the good fight for tiling WM enthusiasts everywhere!

orev 4y ago

In Windows 10 and 11, after you create another virtual desktop, you can easily move between them with built-in Win+Ctrl+Left/Right Arrow. It may not be as perfectly tuned as many would like, but it works well enough.

timeon 4y ago
In case of macbook there are probably shortcuts but trackpad is convenient.
- least 4y ago
  On MacOS you can assign your own shortcuts to switch to specific desktops as well, instead of having to go through each of them individually. Under Keyboard => Shortcuts => Mission Control it give you an option to assign hotkeys for them. I believe the default shortcuts to move left or right a space is ⌃← and ⌃→.
fjfbsufhdvfy 4y ago
You can disable the switch animation, which makes it much nicer to use. Just instantly changes the content on all your monitors then. It even works with fullscreen applications on different desktops...
- vladvasiliu 4y ago
  How do you do that? I've noticed animations seem to be quicker in the win11 22h2 update, which makes them much less annoying, but I still prefer the instant change of i3.
- least 4y ago
  Yep, under Accessibility => Display => Toggle the Reduce motion button. It is much better but still not instant. The only way I'm aware of how to make it instantaneous is by disabling SIP and using Yabai [1]. [1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai
  - 4y ago

least 4y ago

Only fairly recently has Linux really seen much development of tiling WMs on top of things like Gnome and KDE. I know some of them can be run on top of XFCE and have for a while, but all of them fell similarly janky to ones on MacOS. It's only once you adopt something like i3, dwm, awesome, bspwm, xmonad, etc. that you get something that works as you'd hope in terms of spaces and tiling behavior. The problem is that those window managers (in my opinion) is that they fail to do the basics well. You have to find the individual components like the bar if the WM comes with it and write your own scripts or hopefully find one that someone else wrote to get the things that are built into Gnome and KDE and work out of the box. You gotta set up your own notifications daemon. You need to configure how to launch applications through something like rofi or by configuring keybinds in your config. You need to configure your login windows. It can be enjoyable to a point but it can also just become really frustrating to deal with. I think PopOS' tiling WM built on top of Gnome is pretty good but Gnome itself is frustrating trying to configure. KDE is highly configurable but its base configuration/experience is worse than Gnome. The closest I've gotten to something that does both is replacing xfce's xfwm with i3 but ultimately it can easily break since it depends on turning off xfwm in sessions and making i3 an autolaunch item. Linux is obviously the best for tiling WMs, but they have their own set of issues that traditional WMs on popular DEs in linux don't. Windows and MacOS have even more issues when attempting to implement them. I feel like there's just no winning here, regardless of what OS you're using.

bbertelsen 4y ago
The experience with the PopOS related pop shell is an honourable mention here with reasonable key defaults. You should try it if you haven't already, it's quite good.
- least 4y ago
  I did mention that I tried it. The issue is less with the extension and more with dealing with Gnome. I think Gnome has sane defaults and works pretty well for a lot of people but the problem is that the second you want to change something it fights you and Gnome has gotten increasingly hostile towards user customization with each release. I think another issue might have been with setting keybinds with hyper and meh is problematic but it's been a while since I've used Gnome.

bscphil 4y ago

> the REST of Linux really sucks for laptops, with all the hardware-specific tweaks needed Just to state the obvious, "hardware-specific tweaks" are hardware-specific. It is not hard, these days, to buy hardware where everything just works out of the box. It doesn't make sense to say that in general Linux sucks for laptops when what you're complaining about is a problem caused by your hardware.

blondin 4y ago
i bought a laptop from a linux-first company. a laptop designed for linux, with custom hardware and OS and all. i feel very miserable using it. my solace is that it is not my main device. on this very day, i had to disable tap-to-click on the trackpad. so no, comments like the above are true. i would not recommend a linux laptop to anyone. the used Thinkpad and Dell folks are the exceptions, not the norm.
- cookiengineer 4y ago
  Maybe you have issues with the synaptics driver? In case you do, I wrote an in-depth configuration guide for it a while ago [1]. Maybe this helps? [1] https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/synaptics-touchpad-on-linux.html https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/synaptics-touchpad-o...
  - eitland 4y ago
    Added to my pinboard.in (For everyone who thinks this is because Linux has much problems: I had no serious problems with the touchpad in my first 20 years but I hear it is a thing so I expect to see it sooner or later ;-)
- bscphil 4y ago
  Shrug the last laptop we purchased was a boring Dell Inspiron. Wiped Windows and put Arch Linux on it the day we got it without even checking any compatibility stuff. Everything worked out of the box, nothing has ever needed to be configured or crashed. This is 11th gen Intel, nothing old.

eyelidlessness 4y ago

I haven’t used a Linux desktop environment for many years now, so maybe there’s some nuance I’m not understanding, but virtual desktops have been a first class part of the macOS UI for many years. Swiping between them is only delayed by the default animation speed of that aspect of the window manager, and generally meant to match trackpad gestures and provide inertia consistent with other gestures. Trying to understand how this relates to a tiling WM, I’m wondering if the virtual desktop in dedicated tiling WMs concept goes beyond multiple instances of the display and has arbitrary widths (or single dimension spaces)? That does sound nice for some ways I’d want a tiling WM, but it’s not what I’ve previously thought I’d want in one where I might have a grid with non-uniform x/y divisions. Like it sounds very confusing to have a layout such as: a a b b c a a b b c a a d d e And to treat anything besides `a` as a “desktop” even if they’re variable width.

riquito 4y ago
As an example, afaik, fullscreen apps create something else, like a temporary virtual desktop, and you can't assign keybindings to those since they are transient. The default animation is also a dealbraker if you plan on switching continuously desktop
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  I also don’t like either the animation speed or the default full screen behavior. You can configure the animations to be much faster, and use opt+click for a normal full screen window. These are design decisions I don’t prefer, but they definitely don’t suggest virtual desktops aren’t a first class consideration. They’re a first class consideration which don’t match our preferences, sure.
cookiengineer 4y ago
The point why i3 / sway on Linux are used so much is not that they have a specific layouting concept. It's because they let the user decide what layout and how many virtual desktops they need. I usually have 10+ virtual desktops, because I use 3 screens, and each of them has a different set of virtual desktops - which are also not bound to a specific screen and can be moved to another screen just as easily. If I need a new virtual desktop on the fly, I just create one without any repercussions for the rest of the layout (or stack). And I think that's the key concept of tiling WMs: user choice. On MacOS and Windows, on the other hand, I don't see a chance of this working anyhow. The virtual desktops there are usually just a single stack behind the scenes, and they are not per screen, so working with those platforms and expensive window manager tools has been always a pain for me. The fullscreen mode of Apps alone is just so botched, no way this is gonna work failsafe with a third-party window manager that is reverse engineering the unofficial, breaking, APIs.

darthrupert 4y ago

Anecdote: my gaming laptop from 2022 doesn't work on Windows 10/11. It keeps hard crashing when stressed. On Linux, it's totally stable on identical workloads. Personally, I don't see reason anymore for the existence of Windows. For a long time it held its ground as a gaming OS, but Steam/Proton has taken that final advantage from it.

frzen 4y ago
Is it an Alienware? From experience they have an unstable overclock from the factory which is applied by software not in the bios. I was pulling my hair out trying to diagnose crashes on a laptop for someone else. A bonus is if you install docker or WSL, the alienware control software could no longer turn off the overclock. So that whole time I thought there was no way it was overclocked because the option to overclock wasn't even visible in their software. it was a 2022 Alienware with a 12900k 64GB ddr5 and a 3080ti
- darthrupert 4y ago
  >Is it an Alienware? Asus Zephyr G14 with AMD insides. Could be that they are indeed overclocking it for some reason. I didn't seem to get it to be 100% stable even with removing some boosts et al. But that doesn't matter. On Linux I don't have to tweak anything, it just works. Which is amusing.

suslik 4y ago

It is surprising to me that this and some of the subsequent comments view the state of tiling WMs on Mac unfavourably. I run i3gaps on my personal GNU/Linux machine and yabai with skhd at work, and both work equally fine in my experience (of course, it may as well be that my workflow does not rely on some critical piece of functionality that is not available for yabai).

Igrom 4y ago

>Whereas on Linux, I can bind Win+Tab to "Previous Desktop", hold down the button, and watch the screen flick between almost as fast as the refresh rate of the monitor. It really makes a laptop, with a small screen and with no additional monitors, a high productivity environment. In my opinion, you have right there concisely expressed the real differentiator of using a Linux tiling WM. While I understand that there exist numerous incentives for adding animations to graphical user interfaces, such as increased consumer appeal and furnishing the computer program with a time interval in which it can (re)load data, I would also like user interface designers to consider that for some, speed really is paramount, really is second to nothing, and then that those would like to opt out of animations. I care not if the GUI freezes for half a second when switching into a different context, as long as it's lower than the one-second baseline delay introduced by the designer. This becomes so much more important when dealing with the operating system --- it's in use all the time, and the time spent waiting in it compounds and throws one off! It's the "No Child Left Behind", but for GUIs --- let's file down peak performance in order to obtain a more uniform result. On Linux using i3, swapping your workspace costs exactly nothing. I often find myself rapidly and repeatedly switching to-and-fro between any two of them, as if I were performing a trill on a musical instrument, whenever I want to compare the output of two applications. The WM is my personal concierge there. In Mac OS, it feels like I'm stuck waiting in a crowded queue at the post office when there's only one tired and miserable worker around.

extr 4y ago
Yes, I agree, it really does come down to the animation speed. If you could disable animations, MacOS would almost work as well as Linux, since you can natively bind hotkeys to almost everything supported in i3/bspwm type environments. But it's just slow. And there is no reason for it. In fact there is even a bug right now in MacOS where switching between desktops using 3 finger swipe is actually SLOWER using ProMotion than at 60Hz. And if you switch desktops using keyboard hotkeys, it's faster than either of those two. Completely absurd. It's been that way for at least a year and they haven't bothered to fix it.