3 ms·

I’ve been using the sway family of window managers for nearly 20 years! (First ion2, then ion3, then i3, and now sway.) In all this time I’ve briefly used nat

I’ve been using the sway family of window managers for nearly 20 years! (First ion2, then ion3, then i3, and now sway.) In all this time I’ve briefly used native tabs but mostly now use windows without title bars or any other decorations in split mode all of the time. Most of the day I simply have a terminal running tmux on the first workspace with vim in the first tmux window, shells in the others, and a browser on the second sway workspace. Would I benefit from using native windows in sway? It often feels like vim splitting, tmux splitting, Firefox tabs, and sway windows are all fighting with against other or at the very least not cooperating when they could be doing a better job if they all deferred to sway. I’m just not sure how to do that well with easy switching between windows and I don’t know if vim even supports it at all unless I use gvim?

commercialnix 2y ago
I feel like you and I would be friends.
granra 2y ago
I used to also use i3 and later sway and I noticed I only ever tiled my terminals. I don't really remember why but I started using tmux (with tilish) and I liked that I can detach and reattach to sessions later. But at that point I'm just full screening windows so now I'm on gnome and use a single terminal window with tmux :) Edit: my journey of text editors has been vim -> neovim -> helix so I just have them open inside the tmux sessions.
- gorgoiler 2y ago
  Another part of my journey is moving to entirely local development rather than ssh-ing from a $2000 MacBook (running a Linux virtual machine) to a $5000 dev server. I now use native Linux on a $250 mini PC to write my glue code and k8s to hand off all my big compute tasks. But what that really means is, while ssh-tmux-vim is great when you need it, local UIs could be so much richer, and I would never know because I am still tied to using my local machine as if it were a remote host. I should stop writing about it and just do something. I have a feeling that using native sway tabs for everything might be fantastic, if I can get over the hump of making the change.
- dotancohen 2y ago
  As a very longtime VIM user, can you talk me into helix?
  - granra 2y ago
    I'm not one for preaching about software :p I thought I'd miss the infinite extendability of neovim with all my plugins and such but it didn't end up mattering to me and it was quite freeing actually to be just bound to what is supported in the core editor (as long as it's enough for you). I've been waiting for editorconfig support since before switching but it doesn't look like it will be merged into core. Afaik there's plans to add plugin support using some custom lisp language which I'm excited about (I wrote all my neovim config in fennel). But overall it's really fast and comes with essentials built-in like LSP and tree sitter support. There's some learning curve coming from vim in terms of key commands and such as helix is inspired by kakoune in that realm. I don't think I did a really good job at convincing you but that's what came from my head quickly :D
    - dotancohen 2y ago
      Thanks you! I will take a look. I waited very long to jump to neovim.
bee_rider 2y ago
Tmux splits are really nice on the server, and getting the server and my local system to be aware of each other is… either very difficult or impossible. Tmux and vim splits, the competition between them can be a little annoying. Mostly I prefer tmux splits, but the shared yank buffers and ability to link scrolling in vim is really nice. You can open a terminal in vim somehow IIRC, maybe vim as a multiplexer is the way to true enlightenment, haha.
joshmarinacci 2y ago
Could you provide some screenshots? I’d love to see what your desktop looks like with this configuration.

commercialnix 2y ago

I feel like you and I would be friends.

granra 2y ago

I used to also use i3 and later sway and I noticed I only ever tiled my terminals. I don't really remember why but I started using tmux (with tilish) and I liked that I can detach and reattach to sessions later. But at that point I'm just full screening windows so now I'm on gnome and use a single terminal window with tmux :) Edit: my journey of text editors has been vim -> neovim -> helix so I just have them open inside the tmux sessions.

gorgoiler 2y ago
Another part of my journey is moving to entirely local development rather than ssh-ing from a $2000 MacBook (running a Linux virtual machine) to a $5000 dev server. I now use native Linux on a $250 mini PC to write my glue code and k8s to hand off all my big compute tasks. But what that really means is, while ssh-tmux-vim is great when you need it, local UIs could be so much richer, and I would never know because I am still tied to using my local machine as if it were a remote host. I should stop writing about it and just do something. I have a feeling that using native sway tabs for everything might be fantastic, if I can get over the hump of making the change.
dotancohen 2y ago
As a very longtime VIM user, can you talk me into helix?
- granra 2y ago
  I'm not one for preaching about software :p I thought I'd miss the infinite extendability of neovim with all my plugins and such but it didn't end up mattering to me and it was quite freeing actually to be just bound to what is supported in the core editor (as long as it's enough for you). I've been waiting for editorconfig support since before switching but it doesn't look like it will be merged into core. Afaik there's plans to add plugin support using some custom lisp language which I'm excited about (I wrote all my neovim config in fennel). But overall it's really fast and comes with essentials built-in like LSP and tree sitter support. There's some learning curve coming from vim in terms of key commands and such as helix is inspired by kakoune in that realm. I don't think I did a really good job at convincing you but that's what came from my head quickly :D
  - dotancohen 2y ago
    Thanks you! I will take a look. I waited very long to jump to neovim.

bee_rider 2y ago

Tmux splits are really nice on the server, and getting the server and my local system to be aware of each other is… either very difficult or impossible. Tmux and vim splits, the competition between them can be a little annoying. Mostly I prefer tmux splits, but the shared yank buffers and ability to link scrolling in vim is really nice. You can open a terminal in vim somehow IIRC, maybe vim as a multiplexer is the way to true enlightenment, haha.

joshmarinacci 2y ago

Could you provide some screenshots? I’d love to see what your desktop looks like with this configuration.