8 ms·

Cortile – Linux auto tiling manager with hot corner support

167 points by smartmic 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
3abiton 2y ago
Kudos for this, what's your pitch for i3 users?
- squigz 2y ago
  I'm curious about this too. You'll have to pry i3 away from my cold dead hands.
  - stirfish 2y ago
    Stick with i3! For anyone who wants i3 but doesn't want to configure it, the only other option I know of was regolith: https://regolith-desktop.com/ https://regolith-desktop.com/ or https://regolith-linux.org/ https://regolith-linux.org/ This looks like a nice fit for my xfwm machine and I'm excited to try it.
    - squigz 2y ago
      Stuff like Regolith is great, but do yourself a favor and invest some time in making your desktop your own - it makes a world of difference in terms of efficiency, and you get to learn how all these applications work, what they're capable of, etc.
      - pluc 2y ago
        Seriously - i3 config isn't that complicated and the documentation/community is great.
        squigz 2y ago
        Having been part of the i3 community for many years, yes it is, and thanks!
      - stirfish 2y ago
        I agree. I've only used regolith once, and it was a work computer that I didn't feel like copying my config to and didn't want to spend time configuring from scratch. It was nice in that case.
- porphyra 2y ago
  It adds tiling to floating window managers like openbox, xfwm, and kwin, giving tiling to more mainstream desktop environments like GNOME, XFCE, and KDE. It's not really made for i3 users I think. I guess the advantage over i3 would be that those desktop environments have better integration with certain apps and a coherent look and feel. For example, on Ubuntu, which uses a modified GNOME, you can add tiling while still enjoying stuff like the volume control widget, gnome-control-center, consistent file open dialogs, and so on.
- pabs3 2y ago
  There is papersway for sway/i3 folks: https://spwhitton.name/tech/code/papersway/ https://spwhitton.name/tech/code/papersway/
  - jallbrit 2y ago
    Thank you for posting this link, because I am a happy sway user and didn’t realize this existed. I plan to try it out. Have you used it?
    - pabs3 2y ago
      No, I'm a GNOME/KDE user. It is written by a Debian colleague of mine.
    - spwhitton 2y ago
      I (the author) have been using it for several months now and haven't really experienced any dissatisfaction.
lambdaloop 2y ago
This is amazing, I just ran it and it works perfectly for my needs! For context, I recently switched to the KDE window manager (KWin) after a decade of xmonad, to simplify my configuration. KWin supports some tiling but isn't really built for it, so I had some minor annoyances. I ran cortile and it perfectly auto-tiled my windows and allows me to still adjust the sizes with the mouse! Thank you to the author! I'd say some default shortcuts conflict with commonly used browser shortcuts, namely ctrl-shift-t and ctrl-shift-r . It's quite easy to configure these, but I found it to be a strange choice for default shortcuts.
- all2 2y ago
  I have a config on github to replace plasma's core window manager with i3wm. https://github.com/comalice/dotfiles https://github.com/comalice/dotfiles if you're interested. I like kde's batteries included stuff, but none of the tiling functionality matched i3.
- kelvie 2y ago
  Mentioned this in another comment, but there are pretty good implementations of tiling window managers as kwin scripts inside kwin. I've been using Karousel and it's been great, coming straight from Hyprland. I use a plasma widget called "Command Output" to replicate most of what I needed from waybar, and set up Breeze to not have title bars, and added a plugin to get rounded window corners, and I don't miss hyprland at all anymore.
rcarmo 2y ago
Seems pretty nice, but also missing a central column layout (which I use on widescreen monitors).
jamesponddotco 2y ago
This looks pretty nice, I'll have to try it if I ever switch back to X11. What surprises me the most is that it's written in Go. Not a bad thing, I love Go. It surprised me is all.
jesprenj 2y ago
Is there something similar for KDE Plasma on Wayand?
- tmerse 2y ago
  https://github.com/zeroxoneafour/polonium https://github.com/zeroxoneafour/polonium This certainly looks interesting. Cannot comment on it's current state, as I still use bismuth on x11
InTheArena 2y ago
Awesome, I love the pop OS tiling support, but the rest of the OS is a couple of years out of date at this point, so I have not been able to stick with it. The newest version doesn’t compile the newest Ubuntu version either.
neontomo 2y ago
Makes me nostalgic about the time when I used DWM. Their philosophy page is worth a read for developers imo: https://suckless.org/philosophy/ https://suckless.org/philosophy/
- leephillips 2y ago
  Why did you stop using it? Once I tried it I never looked back.
  - fikama 2y ago
    For me its not supporting wayland
  - neontomo 2y ago
    I would use it, I just never thought of getting it set up on my Mac. Do you know if it's possible/as good? I do love the simplicity and speed of DWM.
    - leephillips 2y ago
      There are people using dwm on the Mac. I’ve never tried that myself.
jrm4 2y ago
OMG finally. NEVER understood why you needed to create a whole new WM for the creation of some solid window patterns with shortcuts.
- colordrops 2y ago
  Have you ever used a tiling window manager? It's a lot more than a few shortcuts and window patterns. I've used scripts and apps over standard WMs and it's usually a sub-par experience.
  - jrm4 2y ago
    I have, and my take is literally the opposite of yours. The full-on tiling managers are often very stripped down, and there are a lot of nice little bells and whistles in the big boys that can be made optional.
    - colordrops 2y ago
      What I mean is that the tiling functionality is subpar when added as a second thought. Of course a traditional WM/DM is going to have a lot more bells and whistles.
      - jrm4 2y ago
        Right. I mean, this gets at my whole issue with WM/DEs, why can't they ALL be more modular? At the end of the day, they're just a collection of programs.
        colordrops 2y ago
        Oh yeah, 100%. This domain should also follow the unix philosophy of a composition of single purpose utilities. It's why I prefer tiling WMs like i3, Sway, and Hyprland. They do very little other than managing window tiling and key bindings. Everything else is roll-your-own. My config for Hyprland uses a couple dozen different programs to get things setup to my liking, e.g. Waybar for the system bar, rofi for launching programs, wlsunset for nighttime color management, swayidle and swaylock for the idle locking and lock screen, sway notification center for notifications, grim and slurp for screen capture, etc... I share a lot of my config between Sway and Hyprland because of this modularity. They are flexible enough that you could configure them to look and run just like KDE and no one would be the wiser.
blahgeek 2y ago
It’s sad that this type of projects will not be possible with Wayland, because apparently pluggable wm is not a thing in Wayland
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Arnavion 2y ago
  It can be if one wants to. For example river has its own protocol for letting clients arbitrarily position windows. There's a builtin one that does tiling, and then a bunch of user-created ones at https://codeberg.org/river/wiki/src/branch/master/pages/Community-Layouts.md https://codeberg.org/river/wiki/src/branch/master/pages/Comm... But yes, it requires such extensibility support from the compositor, unlike this project that works with any X11 compositor because it just relies on EWMH.
  - blahgeek 2y ago
    It seems like it's reinventing (an partial, incomplete, non-standard) Xorg protocol on top of Wayland, while we can simply use X11
    - eikenberry 2y ago
      For now... but it is mostly unmaintained at this point and it is only a matter of time before it starts breaking if no one takes over. Which looks doubtful.
- hawski 2y ago
  I thought about this and came to a conclusion, that it should be possible, though not exactly easy, to implement a Wayland compositor that speaks enough X11 to run an X11 Window Manager which would position Wayland windows, while not nullifying the whole security angle of Wayland.
  - p_l 2y ago
NayamAmarshe 2y ago
Great project but I truly believe that these single screen window managers are going to be a thing of the past if Scrollable WMs manage to find some more marketting. Niri[1] and PaperWM[2] for example, these Scrolling WMs provide a way to tile your apps in a way that feels natural. It's like having multiple monitors without having multiple monitors. When I first used PaperWM on Gnome, I just couldn't think of a reason why somebody would even use their computer the normal way when these exist. [1]: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri [2]: https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM PS: Check out Niri's releases section for videos.
- all2 2y ago
  I was going to ask what made a single horizontal strip superior to i3 or swayed, until I saw the work spaces. I'd love to see a vertical version of this for phones and tablets.
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
  Now imagine you could have had that since the beginning of cybertime with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM
- resonious 2y ago
  Wow Niri looks really good. This is basically how I use GNOME. Problem with that is that when I plug into my ultrawide, I have to pull all my windows out of the separate workspaces, and vice-versa when I unplug.
- one-punch 2y ago
  For those on hyprland: [1] hyprslidr: https://gitlab.com/magus/hyprslidr https://gitlab.com/magus/hyprslidr [2] hyprscroller: https://github.com/dawsers/hyprscroller https://github.com/dawsers/hyprscroller Though need to extend hyprland to support layout outside viewport: https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/5489 https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/5489
- kelvie 2y ago
  I just switched from hyprland (due to those toxicity articles) back to KDE, and was pleasantly surprised at how much better these scrollable WMs are. I use Karousel[1] which is actually implemented as a KWin script, amazingly. [1] https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel
Zababa 2y ago
Looks interesting, I'll probably use it if I'm forced to use a KDE or Gnome or something. Counterintuitively, the reason I use tiling managers is not tiling, it's the virtual desktop handling. Last time I tried both gnome and KDE are weird about it. KDE doesn't want you to use mod+é as a shortcut. Gnome allows you to either move both virtual desktops at one or have one fixed and one that moves, but I want both virtual desktops (one on each screen) to move independently.

167 points by smartmic 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

3abiton 2y ago

Kudos for this, what's your pitch for i3 users?

squigz 2y ago
I'm curious about this too. You'll have to pry i3 away from my cold dead hands.
- stirfish 2y ago
  Stick with i3! For anyone who wants i3 but doesn't want to configure it, the only other option I know of was regolith: https://regolith-desktop.com/ https://regolith-desktop.com/ or https://regolith-linux.org/ https://regolith-linux.org/ This looks like a nice fit for my xfwm machine and I'm excited to try it.
  - squigz 2y ago
    Stuff like Regolith is great, but do yourself a favor and invest some time in making your desktop your own - it makes a world of difference in terms of efficiency, and you get to learn how all these applications work, what they're capable of, etc.
    - pluc 2y ago
      Seriously - i3 config isn't that complicated and the documentation/community is great.
      - squigz 2y ago
        Having been part of the i3 community for many years, yes it is, and thanks!
    - stirfish 2y ago
      I agree. I've only used regolith once, and it was a work computer that I didn't feel like copying my config to and didn't want to spend time configuring from scratch. It was nice in that case.
porphyra 2y ago
It adds tiling to floating window managers like openbox, xfwm, and kwin, giving tiling to more mainstream desktop environments like GNOME, XFCE, and KDE. It's not really made for i3 users I think. I guess the advantage over i3 would be that those desktop environments have better integration with certain apps and a coherent look and feel. For example, on Ubuntu, which uses a modified GNOME, you can add tiling while still enjoying stuff like the volume control widget, gnome-control-center, consistent file open dialogs, and so on.
pabs3 2y ago
There is papersway for sway/i3 folks: https://spwhitton.name/tech/code/papersway/ https://spwhitton.name/tech/code/papersway/
- jallbrit 2y ago
  Thank you for posting this link, because I am a happy sway user and didn’t realize this existed. I plan to try it out. Have you used it?
  - pabs3 2y ago
    No, I'm a GNOME/KDE user. It is written by a Debian colleague of mine.
  - spwhitton 2y ago
    I (the author) have been using it for several months now and haven't really experienced any dissatisfaction.

lambdaloop 2y ago

This is amazing, I just ran it and it works perfectly for my needs! For context, I recently switched to the KDE window manager (KWin) after a decade of xmonad, to simplify my configuration. KWin supports some tiling but isn't really built for it, so I had some minor annoyances. I ran cortile and it perfectly auto-tiled my windows and allows me to still adjust the sizes with the mouse! Thank you to the author! I'd say some default shortcuts conflict with commonly used browser shortcuts, namely ctrl-shift-t and ctrl-shift-r . It's quite easy to configure these, but I found it to be a strange choice for default shortcuts.

all2 2y ago
I have a config on github to replace plasma's core window manager with i3wm. https://github.com/comalice/dotfiles https://github.com/comalice/dotfiles if you're interested. I like kde's batteries included stuff, but none of the tiling functionality matched i3.
kelvie 2y ago
Mentioned this in another comment, but there are pretty good implementations of tiling window managers as kwin scripts inside kwin. I've been using Karousel and it's been great, coming straight from Hyprland. I use a plasma widget called "Command Output" to replicate most of what I needed from waybar, and set up Breeze to not have title bars, and added a plugin to get rounded window corners, and I don't miss hyprland at all anymore.

rcarmo 2y ago

Seems pretty nice, but also missing a central column layout (which I use on widescreen monitors).

jamesponddotco 2y ago

This looks pretty nice, I'll have to try it if I ever switch back to X11. What surprises me the most is that it's written in Go. Not a bad thing, I love Go. It surprised me is all.

jesprenj 2y ago

Is there something similar for KDE Plasma on Wayand?

tmerse 2y ago
https://github.com/zeroxoneafour/polonium https://github.com/zeroxoneafour/polonium This certainly looks interesting. Cannot comment on it's current state, as I still use bismuth on x11

InTheArena 2y ago

Awesome, I love the pop OS tiling support, but the rest of the OS is a couple of years out of date at this point, so I have not been able to stick with it. The newest version doesn’t compile the newest Ubuntu version either.

neontomo 2y ago

Makes me nostalgic about the time when I used DWM. Their philosophy page is worth a read for developers imo: https://suckless.org/philosophy/ https://suckless.org/philosophy/

leephillips 2y ago
Why did you stop using it? Once I tried it I never looked back.
- fikama 2y ago
  For me its not supporting wayland
- neontomo 2y ago
  I would use it, I just never thought of getting it set up on my Mac. Do you know if it's possible/as good? I do love the simplicity and speed of DWM.
  - leephillips 2y ago
    There are people using dwm on the Mac. I’ve never tried that myself.

jrm4 2y ago

OMG finally. NEVER understood why you needed to create a whole new WM for the creation of some solid window patterns with shortcuts.

colordrops 2y ago
Have you ever used a tiling window manager? It's a lot more than a few shortcuts and window patterns. I've used scripts and apps over standard WMs and it's usually a sub-par experience.
- jrm4 2y ago
  I have, and my take is literally the opposite of yours. The full-on tiling managers are often very stripped down, and there are a lot of nice little bells and whistles in the big boys that can be made optional.
  - colordrops 2y ago
    What I mean is that the tiling functionality is subpar when added as a second thought. Of course a traditional WM/DM is going to have a lot more bells and whistles.
    - jrm4 2y ago
      Right. I mean, this gets at my whole issue with WM/DEs, why can't they ALL be more modular? At the end of the day, they're just a collection of programs.
      - colordrops 2y ago
        Oh yeah, 100%. This domain should also follow the unix philosophy of a composition of single purpose utilities. It's why I prefer tiling WMs like i3, Sway, and Hyprland. They do very little other than managing window tiling and key bindings. Everything else is roll-your-own. My config for Hyprland uses a couple dozen different programs to get things setup to my liking, e.g. Waybar for the system bar, rofi for launching programs, wlsunset for nighttime color management, swayidle and swaylock for the idle locking and lock screen, sway notification center for notifications, grim and slurp for screen capture, etc... I share a lot of my config between Sway and Hyprland because of this modularity. They are flexible enough that you could configure them to look and run just like KDE and no one would be the wiser.

blahgeek 2y ago

It’s sad that this type of projects will not be possible with Wayland, because apparently pluggable wm is not a thing in Wayland

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Arnavion 2y ago
It can be if one wants to. For example river has its own protocol for letting clients arbitrarily position windows. There's a builtin one that does tiling, and then a bunch of user-created ones at https://codeberg.org/river/wiki/src/branch/master/pages/Community-Layouts.md https://codeberg.org/river/wiki/src/branch/master/pages/Comm... But yes, it requires such extensibility support from the compositor, unlike this project that works with any X11 compositor because it just relies on EWMH.
- blahgeek 2y ago
  It seems like it's reinventing (an partial, incomplete, non-standard) Xorg protocol on top of Wayland, while we can simply use X11
  - eikenberry 2y ago
    For now... but it is mostly unmaintained at this point and it is only a matter of time before it starts breaking if no one takes over. Which looks doubtful.
hawski 2y ago
I thought about this and came to a conclusion, that it should be possible, though not exactly easy, to implement a Wayland compositor that speaks enough X11 to run an X11 Window Manager which would position Wayland windows, while not nullifying the whole security angle of Wayland.
- p_l 2y ago

NayamAmarshe 2y ago

Great project but I truly believe that these single screen window managers are going to be a thing of the past if Scrollable WMs manage to find some more marketting. Niri[1] and PaperWM[2] for example, these Scrolling WMs provide a way to tile your apps in a way that feels natural. It's like having multiple monitors without having multiple monitors. When I first used PaperWM on Gnome, I just couldn't think of a reason why somebody would even use their computer the normal way when these exist. [1]: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri [2]: https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM PS: Check out Niri's releases section for videos.

all2 2y ago
I was going to ask what made a single horizontal strip superior to i3 or swayed, until I saw the work spaces. I'd love to see a vertical version of this for phones and tablets.
LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
Now imagine you could have had that since the beginning of cybertime with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM
resonious 2y ago
Wow Niri looks really good. This is basically how I use GNOME. Problem with that is that when I plug into my ultrawide, I have to pull all my windows out of the separate workspaces, and vice-versa when I unplug.
one-punch 2y ago
For those on hyprland: [1] hyprslidr: https://gitlab.com/magus/hyprslidr https://gitlab.com/magus/hyprslidr [2] hyprscroller: https://github.com/dawsers/hyprscroller https://github.com/dawsers/hyprscroller Though need to extend hyprland to support layout outside viewport: https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/5489 https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/5489
kelvie 2y ago
I just switched from hyprland (due to those toxicity articles) back to KDE, and was pleasantly surprised at how much better these scrollable WMs are. I use Karousel[1] which is actually implemented as a KWin script, amazingly. [1] https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel

Zababa 2y ago

Looks interesting, I'll probably use it if I'm forced to use a KDE or Gnome or something. Counterintuitively, the reason I use tiling managers is not tiling, it's the virtual desktop handling. Last time I tried both gnome and KDE are weird about it. KDE doesn't want you to use mod+é as a shortcut. Gnome allows you to either move both virtual desktops at one or have one fixed and one that moves, but I want both virtual desktops (one on each screen) to move independently.