10 ms·

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).

by rom1v 2y ago

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.

ihalip 2y ago
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.
anewguy9000 2y ago
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
- 3np 2y ago
  qtile is very flexible, I'd be surprised if it's not configurable to get you to where you want.
Suppafly 2y ago
>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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago
      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.
      - penteract 2y ago
lucasoshiro 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 3. Terminals Since you use Emacs, why not use Eat or vterm? https://codeberg.org/akib/emacs-eat https://codeberg.org/akib/emacs-eat https://github.com/akermu/emacs-libvterm 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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
      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.
vidarh 2y ago
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 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
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 2y ago
> 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 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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
    I just Alt+Tab instead and keep most windows centered.
raffraffraff 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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).
  - pxc 2y ago
    Can't tmux's built-in mouse support¹ handle this? Just add set -g option mouse on to your `tmux.conf` and tmux will do mouse selections for you and won't cross pane boundaries. You can use something like tmux-yank² to get your tmux selections onto your OS/DE clipboard if you're not using a nice/modern terminal emulator with OSC 52 support and you don't want to manually plug in `xsel` or `pbcopy` or whatever. (See the tmux docs on clipboard integration³ if you're not sure whether/how your terminal supports the standard.) -- 1: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/tmux.1.html#MOUSE_SUPPORT https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/tmux.1.html#MOUSE_... 2: https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-yank https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-yank 3: https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Clipboard https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Clipboard
    - raffraffraff 2y ago
      Yes it can! It's hard to get precisely the behaviour you want across tmux and vim. I'm 99% there with my config. Selecting any text copies it to the clipboard (with options that work for Xorg or Wayland) and handling panels properly. The only remaining annoyance for me, and one which I don't think is "fixable"... say your left pane is a terminal and you've got a few pages of output (cat something). The right pane has a file open on vim, where you're making notes. As you scroll through the long output you want to select a chunk of text and then paste it into vim, and then carry on scrolling as you hunt for the next clue. Except that the instant you select text, focus returns to the prompt at the bottom of the pane. You compete lose your scroll position. It's intensely annoying. The workaround is "don't do it that way", which is fine until you forget and end up shouting at your computer.
ranger207 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
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.
- Zetaphor 2y ago
  I recently discovered scrolling windows managers (using Karousel on KDE) and it has become my preferred workflow
christophilus 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
- cycomanic 2y ago
  Theres also papersway which is a paperwm plugin for sway which works quite nicely
mbrumlow 2y ago
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.
nmg 2y ago
+1 for Terminator, my first install for 15+ years on Linux. Solid
matheusmoreira 2y ago
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.
BeetleB 2y ago
> 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).
- sweeter 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
    - sangnoir 2y ago
      Use a keyboard shortcut to switch to a tiling layout? Or if you're psychotic, like I am, activate your Quake-style semi-transparent terminal that overlays the desktop, allowing you to (barely) read the superimposed instructions in the browser window below. IMO, tiled Quake-style overlay terminals (guake, yakuake, iTerm hotkey window) over floating windows offer the best of both worlds.
exe34 2y ago
On Xmonad, I have 9 workspaces - I open other things in different spaces from my web browser.
d0mine 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
- mashpanic 2y ago
  I’m with you and I remember a brief time when Windows ?!? had the nerve to try this with Microsoft Edge (Windows 8-ish). I love workspaces and generally don’t like applications to have internal tabs.
- wongogue 2y ago
  You can reduce Firefox or its forks to just the page viewport with no UI. Turn off tab bar and toggle the setting to always opens windows for links.
- mharig 2y ago
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mharig 2y ago
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snapplebobapple 2y ago
That's kind of funny because I use a tiling window manager (hyprland) because I don't want those things resized. things resize in a predictable way so you just hover the mouse over the tile you are ok with resizing on you and that's all that changes (then you can hold your mod key and drag what opened wherever you want or hit your mod key combo to make it floating and it will float instead of tile. My video player tile is tabbed so I can drag as much stuff in there as I want and it will never resize, just add tabs that I can tab through).The tiling lets me very quickly create the desktop layout I want every time and it's always exactly how I want it or easy to fix, so for me that's great.
bravetraveler 2y ago
> I think tiling is great for terminals, but not for the whole desktop Same, yet I use a tiling WM (Sway); how? Telling it I want tabbed workspaces! The tiling is available. By default things behave as if 'maximized' - easy to pop out/move/whatever.
winternewt 2y ago
I agree that resizing the browser automatically isn't optimal, but I suck it up because tiling window managers don't require me to use the mouse and that's worth everything to me. If anybody made a more innovative/flexible keyboard-controlled alternative I'd be all over it.

by rom1v 2y ago

ihalip 2y ago

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.

anewguy9000 2y ago

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

3np 2y ago
qtile is very flexible, I'd be surprised if it's not configurable to get you to where you want.

Suppafly 2y ago

>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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    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.
    - penteract 2y ago

lucasoshiro 2y ago

> 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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 3. Terminals Since you use Emacs, why not use Eat or vterm? https://codeberg.org/akib/emacs-eat https://codeberg.org/akib/emacs-eat https://github.com/akermu/emacs-libvterm 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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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.

vidarh 2y ago

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 2y ago

> 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 2y ago

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 2y ago

> 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 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 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  I just Alt+Tab instead and keep most windows centered.

raffraffraff 2y ago

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 2y ago
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).
- pxc 2y ago
  Can't tmux's built-in mouse support¹ handle this? Just add set -g option mouse on to your `tmux.conf` and tmux will do mouse selections for you and won't cross pane boundaries. You can use something like tmux-yank² to get your tmux selections onto your OS/DE clipboard if you're not using a nice/modern terminal emulator with OSC 52 support and you don't want to manually plug in `xsel` or `pbcopy` or whatever. (See the tmux docs on clipboard integration³ if you're not sure whether/how your terminal supports the standard.) -- 1: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/tmux.1.html#MOUSE_SUPPORT https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/tmux.1.html#MOUSE_... 2: https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-yank https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-yank 3: https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Clipboard https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Clipboard
  - raffraffraff 2y ago
    Yes it can! It's hard to get precisely the behaviour you want across tmux and vim. I'm 99% there with my config. Selecting any text copies it to the clipboard (with options that work for Xorg or Wayland) and handling panels properly. The only remaining annoyance for me, and one which I don't think is "fixable"... say your left pane is a terminal and you've got a few pages of output (cat something). The right pane has a file open on vim, where you're making notes. As you scroll through the long output you want to select a chunk of text and then paste it into vim, and then carry on scrolling as you hunt for the next clue. Except that the instant you select text, focus returns to the prompt at the bottom of the pane. You compete lose your scroll position. It's intensely annoying. The workaround is "don't do it that way", which is fine until you forget and end up shouting at your computer.

ranger207 2y ago

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 2y ago
> 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 2y ago

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.

Zetaphor 2y ago
I recently discovered scrolling windows managers (using Karousel on KDE) and it has become my preferred workflow

christophilus 2y ago

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 2y ago
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.
cycomanic 2y ago
Theres also papersway which is a paperwm plugin for sway which works quite nicely

mbrumlow 2y ago

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.

nmg 2y ago

+1 for Terminator, my first install for 15+ years on Linux. Solid

matheusmoreira 2y ago

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.

BeetleB 2y ago

> 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).

sweeter 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    Use a keyboard shortcut to switch to a tiling layout? Or if you're psychotic, like I am, activate your Quake-style semi-transparent terminal that overlays the desktop, allowing you to (barely) read the superimposed instructions in the browser window below. IMO, tiled Quake-style overlay terminals (guake, yakuake, iTerm hotkey window) over floating windows offer the best of both worlds.

exe34 2y ago

On Xmonad, I have 9 workspaces - I open other things in different spaces from my web browser.

d0mine 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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.
mashpanic 2y ago
I’m with you and I remember a brief time when Windows ?!? had the nerve to try this with Microsoft Edge (Windows 8-ish). I love workspaces and generally don’t like applications to have internal tabs.
wongogue 2y ago
You can reduce Firefox or its forks to just the page viewport with no UI. Turn off tab bar and toggle the setting to always opens windows for links.
mharig 2y ago
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mharig 2y ago

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snapplebobapple 2y ago

That's kind of funny because I use a tiling window manager (hyprland) because I don't want those things resized. things resize in a predictable way so you just hover the mouse over the tile you are ok with resizing on you and that's all that changes (then you can hold your mod key and drag what opened wherever you want or hit your mod key combo to make it floating and it will float instead of tile. My video player tile is tabbed so I can drag as much stuff in there as I want and it will never resize, just add tabs that I can tab through).The tiling lets me very quickly create the desktop layout I want every time and it's always exactly how I want it or easy to fix, so for me that's great.

bravetraveler 2y ago

> I think tiling is great for terminals, but not for the whole desktop Same, yet I use a tiling WM (Sway); how? Telling it I want tabbed workspaces! The tiling is available. By default things behave as if 'maximized' - easy to pop out/move/whatever.

winternewt 2y ago

I agree that resizing the browser automatically isn't optimal, but I suck it up because tiling window managers don't require me to use the mouse and that's worth everything to me. If anybody made a more innovative/flexible keyboard-controlled alternative I'd be all over it.