7 ms·

Moving Back to a Tiling WM – XMonad

79 points by weirdsmiley 11mo ago

bryanlarsen 11mo ago
Recent versions of KDE have pretty good tiling support, so it's possible to have a rich DE and good tiling.
- moooo99 11mo ago
  I also find KDE to be good enough for my personal taste. I have tried different WMs, but always found the huge configuration effort to not be worth the marginal productivity gains I get over KDE + some custom keybinds
- backscratches 11mo ago
  Even xfce will tile windows to 4 quadrants, left/right-halves, top/bottom-halves. I have not studied other tiling window managers enough to know what I'm missing.
  - bryanlarsen 11mo ago
    Even Windows will do that, and so did older KDE. KDE 6.1+ will do a lot more than that, everything that I previously used a tiling manager to do.
- SubiculumCode 11mo ago
  when you say tiling support, do you mean automatic tiling, or sending it to a corner via key combo?
  - WD-42 11mo ago
    It's not even the tiling so much, but the ability to move directionally between windows using super+hjkl or whatever, that's the killer for me. The big DEs like KDE and GNOME can technically tile but you're still stuck with alt-tab to switch windows which is horrible.
    - bryanlarsen 11mo ago
      meta-alt-up/left/down-right by default on KDE.
    - silon42 11mo ago
      Alt+Tab is great... I wouldn't use a desktop without proper Alt+Tab (exactly like in KDE).
    - cout 11mo ago
      That's why I wrote this: https://github.com/cout/windowfocus https://github.com/cout/windowfocus I bind Alt+Shift+H to run "windowfocus left", which figures out which window is "to the left" based on some heuristics such as the direction between the center of the active window and the other windows on the screen. Since it works uses the center of the window, it works with overlapping windows (but intentionally excludes windows that are occluded). I've used it in both xfce and kde (though not recently).
      - bryanlarsen 11mo ago
        KDE's meta alt arrow doesn't exclude occluded windows, but if you're tiling you probably don't have those
  - corank 11mo ago
    If you want automatic tiling, there are Kwin scripts for that eg https://github.com/anametologin/krohnkite/ https://github.com/anametologin/krohnkite/ Essentially turning kwin into a tiling WM
- agumonkey 11mo ago
  gotta admit that since windows 7 added win+arrow to quickly split, maximize, i don't have a hard need on tiling WM anymore. I very rarely use other layouts like stacks ..
- bryanlarsen 11mo ago
  P.S. Meta-T to get started with tiling on KDE.
CSDude 11mo ago
I used Xmonad for a while, then switched to awesomewm used it for years. It was good on a 1366x768 screen to use space efficiently.
WD-42 11mo ago
Tiling WMs are dead. Long live tiling WMs. Scrolling WMs like Niri/Paperwm are where it’s at now.
- fer 11mo ago
  Just moved to Niri, it's incredible how snappy it is. The animation makes what you did with the window much clearer vs. other wms where it just teleports, the scrolling just compounds to that effect. The scrolling is great because it tends to work at getting things out of the way when they're not relevant and bringing them back when they are, while not ending up with tiny windows like dwm/AwesomeWM/Sway (what I've been using for the last ~15 years).
- lelandbatey 11mo ago
  Looking at a video demo of Niri for an example: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri Conceptually, it's like an infinite 2D canvas windows, divided into strips (strip is a workspace), and you then scroll through an infinite ribbon of windows in each strip. Seems interesting, but also slower and less flexible than traditional tiling WMs (least of all because of the slow scrolling animations, but also because it seems to prefer scrolling instead of jumping-towards). Like most of the 'tiling with gaps' patches I see, these feel like trying to look fancy without necessarily delivering big value. I'd be interested to hear why people want a scrolling WM. Is it merely more visually pleasing?
  - Philpax 11mo ago
    I'm still a Niri newbie, but I'm enjoying the scrolling as a ways to have "subworkspaces": when I'm working on a full-stack project, for example, I can scroll between the backend and the frontend, while arranging my windows in such a way that anything useful (e.g. the browser) remains resident on screen. You can get similar functionality with tabbed windows, but I'm still trying to decide which workflow I prefer; scrolling feels a bit more "organic", while tabs are superior for density.
  - WD-42 11mo ago
    It's the same thing as a tiling WM, with all the benefits. You can still tile windows vertically or horizontally. The big improvement is that if I have a view with my browser, editor, a terminal or two all tiled nicely but then all of a sudden I need to open the Gimp or a PDF for some one-off work related to what I'm working on, it just opens to the right. I can move over to it and do what I need to do without messing up the current layout and then close it when I'm done. This is opposed to a traditional tiling WM where you'd either need to open the app in another workspace, use some stacking feature or worst of all shove the new window into the current view by resizing some other window(s) which is often not ideal.
Der_Einzige 11mo ago
The only reason I used manjaro and thus arch was that it had really nice I3, bspwm, and xmonad distributions. It's very fun to rice a setup and make something worthy of posting on r/linuxporn.
Philpax 11mo ago
Configuring your WM in Haskell seems fun, but I suspect "fun" is the primary motivator, not any kind of practical reason. Type-checking keybindings is cute, but you're going to discover that the keybinding doesn't work when you go to use it, so how much time are you really saving? That's not helped by the fact that many WMs/compositors have validators for their configs, so you're getting much of the same benefit with much less trouble. For reference, Niri's config is very approachable: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/blob/main/resources/default-config.kdl https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/blob/main/resources/default-c...
- neilv 11mo ago
  > Configuring your WM in Haskell seems fun, but I suspect "fun" is the primary motivator, not any kind of practical reason. Not for me. I don't know Haskell, and I had to cargo-cult forms to do what I want (which bothers me, as someone towards the end of the developer spectrum that likes to understand well how systems work). But XMonad with a few cargo-culted tweaks works noticeably better for me than I've been able to configure i3wm. I forced myself to use i3wm at one company, for two years, rather than bring over my Xmonad config, and every evening it was a relief to be back using Xmonad on my personal laptop.
  - Philpax 11mo ago
    I haven't used it in some years, but I found AwesomeWM to work well for me for the usecase of configurable predefined window layouts. Is there anything in particular about Xmonad that keeps you coming back?
- rootnod3 11mo ago
  Apart from the Haskell fun, xmonad is really really good. Especially how it handles workspaces on multiple monitors. By default, each monitor has one workspace. Not one workspace for ALL monitors. So if your side screen has say documentation open, and you switch on your main screen from terminal to editor, only the main screen changes. The side screen stays untouched. Some people prefer it, some hate it. But it's good that xmonad offers it. It also has hot reloading of the config, which is also nice. Sure, Niri's config is approachable, but is it hackable? It only offers what Niri offers, right? You can't extend its functionality by config alone. That is where XMonad and others shine. Sure, they might not be for the "I don't wanna spend time configuring my WM to death" crowd (and I mean absolutely no derision in that. We all have different rabbit holes we want to customize to oblivion), but Xmonad or Stumpwm etc allow for those shenanigans, and I myself am very very happy to have those. Long story short, it's not all 100% about the type safety, it's also a lot about the extensibility of it. Niri is nice, not mocking it. But infinite scrolling is not everyone's jam. Some others might even question the choice of KDL instead of JSON without any clear benifit. Whatever you prefer and if it works for you, great. That's why we have choices ^^
theoldgreybeard 11mo ago
Switched to Hyprland about a month ago. Wasn't feeling it at first but after a few weeks I don't think I can go back.
smallerfish 11mo ago
I think Claude Code makes TilingWMs doable. I've always given up in the past because there have been reams of configs necessary to get to a fairly usable state, and I don't love reading manuals for desktop environments - but now it's all pretty easy to crank out. I've been on HyprLand for a week now and haven't hit any blockers yet that'd force me to go back to KDE.
- 0x1ch 11mo ago
  I think Claude Code is the crutch for being unable to go through docs.
  - smallerfish 11mo ago
    Who wants to spend their weekends reading desktop environment docs? If that's your hobby, fine. I just want a working DE.
    - 0x1ch 11mo ago
      I believe it saves time, the documentation is available and easily digestible, and there's thousands of existing dotfiles to take from. I'd be disappointed to hear Claude couldn't do this. I'm mostly pointing out that the documentation is very easy to read and implement for most tiling WMs, without the need for a coding agent.
      - smallerfish 11mo ago
        Who wants to read thousands of existing dotfiles? But I'm primarily talking about the missing pieces that most tiling window managers have that you need to implement yourself, or the annoying bugs that are buried in github. I need a lock screen; fine, hyperidle. How is it configured? Once it works it works.15 seconds with Claude or 2-3 minutes googling and implementing. Why the hell would you not use it? QT apps have fuzzy fonts in Hyprland. Turns out that's because I was using 1.5 fractional scaling on my 4k monitor, which was information buried in some github that has barely any traffic, which Claude found while I was doing actual work. The google meet PIP window strobes because who the hell knows why, but that too was solved by Claude finding the right github ticket and applying opacity 0.999 instead of 1.0 for that window specifically. Where is that documented in the hyprland manual? The point is that tiling window managers _in my experience_ always have rough edges, and I've been dipping in and out of them for 20 years. Now that many people (I guess not including your good self) are using LLMs all day every day to move faster in producing code, you can apply the same tooling to bring the tiling environment up to the same level of quality that we're used to with the bigger DMs that have a lot more resources and eyes on them.
NoboruWataya 11mo ago
I have been a happy user of AwesomeWM for years. I don't actually use the tiling layout all that much (I definitely do use it occasionally and find it useful, but usually I'm in floating or "monocle" mode). But in additional to tiling support, it is minimalist, keyboard-driven and infinitely configurable through Lua scripts which I really like. I think a lot of other tiling WMs are probably popular for similar reasons.
- Froztnova 11mo ago
  I've been an awesomewm user for quite some time as well and have no plans to change. It's the lua scripting that really pushes it to the next level for me. I think I fell in love when I set up randomized times wallpaper rotations, and then realized that I could also create multiple profiles/sets of wallpapers as well, and the only limit was my own ability to add it.
  - SoftTalker 11mo ago
    I love awesome as well but afaik it’s not compatible with Wayland and never will be.
Symmetry 11mo ago
The reason I switched to XMonad over a decade ago was actually so that I could have a tiling window manager but still have all the normal desktop environment conveniences. Obligatory dotfiles: https://github.com/aclough/dotfiles https://github.com/aclough/dotfiles But right now I feel like I should be thinking of moving over to some new Wayland system. Maybe Niri and XFCE?
anthk 11mo ago
I prefer cwm, it has tags, (virtual desktops), and it can be fully keyboard managed.
jmclnx 11mo ago
I still do not understand why people like Tiling WM, maybe I should give it another try. In the old 4:3 days I used ratpoison for a while, but after months I went back to fvwm. On 4:3 it seemed to work great, but I tend to think on these 16:9/16:10 monitors it could be a PITA. I believe I would need to move my head to the right a lot. On 4:3 no such issue. FWIW, via fvwm I force all my main applications to place themselves on the left 2/3 portion of the monitor. The right 2/3 are for things like xmag, clocks, monitors and FvwmButtons/FvwmIconMan.
thot_experiment 11mo ago
I've been using XMonad since 2012, not really for any reason other than someone at HMC told me to and I just stuck with it ever since. Sometimes I wonder if there's a reason to try something else, but I already know all the keybinds and it just does everything I want. My absolute favorite feature (i'm sure this is present elsewhere too) is the idea that I have my stuff laid out on virtual screens and I can just assign a virtual screen to a physical screen super trivially without ever moving my hands off the keyboard. It's such a wonderful workflow. Tiling WMs are one of those power user things where once you get used to it the other way just seem so obviously bad. VIM and Blender are similar, unfamiliar annoying interface if you're used to the normie way of doing things, but once you understand the patterns and the way you can compose them it becomes so much more expressive.
SubiculumCode 11mo ago
I use remote desktops a lot (e.g. X2go). A lot of issues seem to come up with using Super key combos on the remote desktop. Anyone know of a good solution for that?
zem 11mo ago
my favourite xmonad feature (that distinguished it from the other tiling WMs I've used) is the ability to have empty workspaces. that way I can maintain a persistent mapping of applications to workspaces, with muscle memory for the keybindings to switch to various apps. (also a nice trick I picked up from someone else's config file was to have a "scratch space" desktop with a key binding that either moved to it or moved back to the desktop I came from)
- somat 11mo ago
  If we are doing a survey I use spectrwm and it has empty/dedicated workspaces. It also has a concept of shared workspaces, windows there are present in all workspaces, used for fleshing out common desktop ui docks and the like. I have to admit that while I spent a couple of hours figuring it out one day, It turns out I prefer a really thin/bare desktop so don't use it. Spectrwm is not well known, but it fits this sweet spot between super simple with few moving parts yet still configurable enough to work the way I want to. far simpler than xmonad or even I3 but with better defaults and more easily configurable than dwm.
  - zem 11mo ago
    does it integrate well with any desktop environment? that was the other killer feature of xmonad for me, it worked well with MATE and kde until the wayland switch. I ultimately switched to cosmic because of issues with the (wayland + DE + xmonad) stack, but I do miss the better tiling features of xmonad.
    - somat 11mo ago
      Unfortunately I don't really know, I mean as far as I can tell gnome or kde programs run fine, but I am not running any of background tooling that normally goes with a full desktop environment.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
lone-cloud 11mo ago
At the risk of sounding like a linux snob, I highly question OP's taste: - recommending X11 WM/DE over Wayland in 2025 is nasty work - 7.3/8 GB swap usage? mad man - bash? meh. integrated GPU? meh - 4k packages installed seems super excessive (I'm at 887 (pacman)) - that topbar has way too much superfluous info and looks bad. I guess it's nice if you frequently forget which timezone you're in and need to know how fast the wind is outside?
errantmind 11mo ago
The best part about choosing a simple WM is you never have to think about it again. I installed and configured DWM many years ago and it just works. Never had a single issue after the first week. It is like when you buy an appliance and it just fades into the background and then, one day, you realize you've had it for 10 years without any problems and you feel a tinge of gratitude before moving on with your day.
- nicklaf 11mo ago
  Same story here. After installing dwm years ago, I've more or less stopped thinking about window managers as an open problem to be solved. I suppose one could run into trouble if they started patching it a lot, but in my experience you don't need to do that.
zenethian 11mo ago
> When I was still using Manjaro Linux back in 2019, I got a nudge to try i3wm. It was my first experience with any window manager Is the author saying that until 2019 they used Linux on the desktop without using X?
- ratrocket 11mo ago
  I read it to mean the author used "desktop environments" prior to that, so KDE or Gnome, as opposed to a "bare" window manager.
Duanemclemore 11mo ago
When I got back on Linux as a daily driver a year ago I knew I wanted to be on a tiling / dynamic window manager. I started with i3 and really like the keybindings. A couple months later I found out about xmonad through general interest in the subject. I installed it, found someone's config to use i3 keybinds (which I was used to at that point) and had a lot of fun. It's definitely quick as heck and I like how compact the codebase is for edits. Plus, it gave me an excuse to learn some rudimentary Haskell. My visual setup is always SUPER minimal, as it comes out of the box. So that was nice. Unfortunately I had some serious trouble with X11 and an app my workflow relies on running in wine, so I switched to sway for Wayland (such as it is it fixed the issue). I know some folks from the xmonad community are trying to implement it over Wayland [0], and were it to come to fruition it would be a VERY welcome development. [0] https://discourse.haskell.org/t/xmonad-for-wayland-call-for-help/7812 https://discourse.haskell.org/t/xmonad-for-wayland-call-for-...
jxdxbx 11mo ago
As I expected lots of discussion of scrolling managers in this thread. I'll just say that I think that scrolling windows managers like Niri, which I use, are very well suited for laptops in particular. Tiling WMs always feel cramped on a smaller screen. Plus the touchpad to swipe as navigation fits really well with the paradigm.

79 points by weirdsmiley 11mo ago

bryanlarsen 11mo ago

Recent versions of KDE have pretty good tiling support, so it's possible to have a rich DE and good tiling.

moooo99 11mo ago
I also find KDE to be good enough for my personal taste. I have tried different WMs, but always found the huge configuration effort to not be worth the marginal productivity gains I get over KDE + some custom keybinds
backscratches 11mo ago
Even xfce will tile windows to 4 quadrants, left/right-halves, top/bottom-halves. I have not studied other tiling window managers enough to know what I'm missing.
- bryanlarsen 11mo ago
  Even Windows will do that, and so did older KDE. KDE 6.1+ will do a lot more than that, everything that I previously used a tiling manager to do.
SubiculumCode 11mo ago
when you say tiling support, do you mean automatic tiling, or sending it to a corner via key combo?
- WD-42 11mo ago
  It's not even the tiling so much, but the ability to move directionally between windows using super+hjkl or whatever, that's the killer for me. The big DEs like KDE and GNOME can technically tile but you're still stuck with alt-tab to switch windows which is horrible.
  - bryanlarsen 11mo ago
    meta-alt-up/left/down-right by default on KDE.
  - silon42 11mo ago
    Alt+Tab is great... I wouldn't use a desktop without proper Alt+Tab (exactly like in KDE).
  - cout 11mo ago
    That's why I wrote this: https://github.com/cout/windowfocus https://github.com/cout/windowfocus I bind Alt+Shift+H to run "windowfocus left", which figures out which window is "to the left" based on some heuristics such as the direction between the center of the active window and the other windows on the screen. Since it works uses the center of the window, it works with overlapping windows (but intentionally excludes windows that are occluded). I've used it in both xfce and kde (though not recently).
    - bryanlarsen 11mo ago
      KDE's meta alt arrow doesn't exclude occluded windows, but if you're tiling you probably don't have those
- corank 11mo ago
  If you want automatic tiling, there are Kwin scripts for that eg https://github.com/anametologin/krohnkite/ https://github.com/anametologin/krohnkite/ Essentially turning kwin into a tiling WM
agumonkey 11mo ago
gotta admit that since windows 7 added win+arrow to quickly split, maximize, i don't have a hard need on tiling WM anymore. I very rarely use other layouts like stacks ..
bryanlarsen 11mo ago
P.S. Meta-T to get started with tiling on KDE.

CSDude 11mo ago

I used Xmonad for a while, then switched to awesomewm used it for years. It was good on a 1366x768 screen to use space efficiently.

WD-42 11mo ago

Tiling WMs are dead. Long live tiling WMs. Scrolling WMs like Niri/Paperwm are where it’s at now.

fer 11mo ago
Just moved to Niri, it's incredible how snappy it is. The animation makes what you did with the window much clearer vs. other wms where it just teleports, the scrolling just compounds to that effect. The scrolling is great because it tends to work at getting things out of the way when they're not relevant and bringing them back when they are, while not ending up with tiny windows like dwm/AwesomeWM/Sway (what I've been using for the last ~15 years).
lelandbatey 11mo ago
Looking at a video demo of Niri for an example: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri Conceptually, it's like an infinite 2D canvas windows, divided into strips (strip is a workspace), and you then scroll through an infinite ribbon of windows in each strip. Seems interesting, but also slower and less flexible than traditional tiling WMs (least of all because of the slow scrolling animations, but also because it seems to prefer scrolling instead of jumping-towards). Like most of the 'tiling with gaps' patches I see, these feel like trying to look fancy without necessarily delivering big value. I'd be interested to hear why people want a scrolling WM. Is it merely more visually pleasing?
- Philpax 11mo ago
  I'm still a Niri newbie, but I'm enjoying the scrolling as a ways to have "subworkspaces": when I'm working on a full-stack project, for example, I can scroll between the backend and the frontend, while arranging my windows in such a way that anything useful (e.g. the browser) remains resident on screen. You can get similar functionality with tabbed windows, but I'm still trying to decide which workflow I prefer; scrolling feels a bit more "organic", while tabs are superior for density.
- WD-42 11mo ago
  It's the same thing as a tiling WM, with all the benefits. You can still tile windows vertically or horizontally. The big improvement is that if I have a view with my browser, editor, a terminal or two all tiled nicely but then all of a sudden I need to open the Gimp or a PDF for some one-off work related to what I'm working on, it just opens to the right. I can move over to it and do what I need to do without messing up the current layout and then close it when I'm done. This is opposed to a traditional tiling WM where you'd either need to open the app in another workspace, use some stacking feature or worst of all shove the new window into the current view by resizing some other window(s) which is often not ideal.

Der_Einzige 11mo ago

The only reason I used manjaro and thus arch was that it had really nice I3, bspwm, and xmonad distributions. It's very fun to rice a setup and make something worthy of posting on r/linuxporn.

Philpax 11mo ago

Configuring your WM in Haskell seems fun, but I suspect "fun" is the primary motivator, not any kind of practical reason. Type-checking keybindings is cute, but you're going to discover that the keybinding doesn't work when you go to use it, so how much time are you really saving? That's not helped by the fact that many WMs/compositors have validators for their configs, so you're getting much of the same benefit with much less trouble. For reference, Niri's config is very approachable: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/blob/main/resources/default-config.kdl https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/blob/main/resources/default-c...

neilv 11mo ago
> Configuring your WM in Haskell seems fun, but I suspect "fun" is the primary motivator, not any kind of practical reason. Not for me. I don't know Haskell, and I had to cargo-cult forms to do what I want (which bothers me, as someone towards the end of the developer spectrum that likes to understand well how systems work). But XMonad with a few cargo-culted tweaks works noticeably better for me than I've been able to configure i3wm. I forced myself to use i3wm at one company, for two years, rather than bring over my Xmonad config, and every evening it was a relief to be back using Xmonad on my personal laptop.
- Philpax 11mo ago
  I haven't used it in some years, but I found AwesomeWM to work well for me for the usecase of configurable predefined window layouts. Is there anything in particular about Xmonad that keeps you coming back?
rootnod3 11mo ago
Apart from the Haskell fun, xmonad is really really good. Especially how it handles workspaces on multiple monitors. By default, each monitor has one workspace. Not one workspace for ALL monitors. So if your side screen has say documentation open, and you switch on your main screen from terminal to editor, only the main screen changes. The side screen stays untouched. Some people prefer it, some hate it. But it's good that xmonad offers it. It also has hot reloading of the config, which is also nice. Sure, Niri's config is approachable, but is it hackable? It only offers what Niri offers, right? You can't extend its functionality by config alone. That is where XMonad and others shine. Sure, they might not be for the "I don't wanna spend time configuring my WM to death" crowd (and I mean absolutely no derision in that. We all have different rabbit holes we want to customize to oblivion), but Xmonad or Stumpwm etc allow for those shenanigans, and I myself am very very happy to have those. Long story short, it's not all 100% about the type safety, it's also a lot about the extensibility of it. Niri is nice, not mocking it. But infinite scrolling is not everyone's jam. Some others might even question the choice of KDL instead of JSON without any clear benifit. Whatever you prefer and if it works for you, great. That's why we have choices ^^

theoldgreybeard 11mo ago

Switched to Hyprland about a month ago. Wasn't feeling it at first but after a few weeks I don't think I can go back.

smallerfish 11mo ago

I think Claude Code makes TilingWMs doable. I've always given up in the past because there have been reams of configs necessary to get to a fairly usable state, and I don't love reading manuals for desktop environments - but now it's all pretty easy to crank out. I've been on HyprLand for a week now and haven't hit any blockers yet that'd force me to go back to KDE.

0x1ch 11mo ago
I think Claude Code is the crutch for being unable to go through docs.
- smallerfish 11mo ago
  Who wants to spend their weekends reading desktop environment docs? If that's your hobby, fine. I just want a working DE.
  - 0x1ch 11mo ago
    I believe it saves time, the documentation is available and easily digestible, and there's thousands of existing dotfiles to take from. I'd be disappointed to hear Claude couldn't do this. I'm mostly pointing out that the documentation is very easy to read and implement for most tiling WMs, without the need for a coding agent.
    - smallerfish 11mo ago
      Who wants to read thousands of existing dotfiles? But I'm primarily talking about the missing pieces that most tiling window managers have that you need to implement yourself, or the annoying bugs that are buried in github. I need a lock screen; fine, hyperidle. How is it configured? Once it works it works.15 seconds with Claude or 2-3 minutes googling and implementing. Why the hell would you not use it? QT apps have fuzzy fonts in Hyprland. Turns out that's because I was using 1.5 fractional scaling on my 4k monitor, which was information buried in some github that has barely any traffic, which Claude found while I was doing actual work. The google meet PIP window strobes because who the hell knows why, but that too was solved by Claude finding the right github ticket and applying opacity 0.999 instead of 1.0 for that window specifically. Where is that documented in the hyprland manual? The point is that tiling window managers _in my experience_ always have rough edges, and I've been dipping in and out of them for 20 years. Now that many people (I guess not including your good self) are using LLMs all day every day to move faster in producing code, you can apply the same tooling to bring the tiling environment up to the same level of quality that we're used to with the bigger DMs that have a lot more resources and eyes on them.

NoboruWataya 11mo ago

I have been a happy user of AwesomeWM for years. I don't actually use the tiling layout all that much (I definitely do use it occasionally and find it useful, but usually I'm in floating or "monocle" mode). But in additional to tiling support, it is minimalist, keyboard-driven and infinitely configurable through Lua scripts which I really like. I think a lot of other tiling WMs are probably popular for similar reasons.

Froztnova 11mo ago
I've been an awesomewm user for quite some time as well and have no plans to change. It's the lua scripting that really pushes it to the next level for me. I think I fell in love when I set up randomized times wallpaper rotations, and then realized that I could also create multiple profiles/sets of wallpapers as well, and the only limit was my own ability to add it.
- SoftTalker 11mo ago
  I love awesome as well but afaik it’s not compatible with Wayland and never will be.

Symmetry 11mo ago

The reason I switched to XMonad over a decade ago was actually so that I could have a tiling window manager but still have all the normal desktop environment conveniences. Obligatory dotfiles: https://github.com/aclough/dotfiles https://github.com/aclough/dotfiles But right now I feel like I should be thinking of moving over to some new Wayland system. Maybe Niri and XFCE?

anthk 11mo ago

I prefer cwm, it has tags, (virtual desktops), and it can be fully keyboard managed.

jmclnx 11mo ago

I still do not understand why people like Tiling WM, maybe I should give it another try. In the old 4:3 days I used ratpoison for a while, but after months I went back to fvwm. On 4:3 it seemed to work great, but I tend to think on these 16:9/16:10 monitors it could be a PITA. I believe I would need to move my head to the right a lot. On 4:3 no such issue. FWIW, via fvwm I force all my main applications to place themselves on the left 2/3 portion of the monitor. The right 2/3 are for things like xmag, clocks, monitors and FvwmButtons/FvwmIconMan.

thot_experiment 11mo ago

I've been using XMonad since 2012, not really for any reason other than someone at HMC told me to and I just stuck with it ever since. Sometimes I wonder if there's a reason to try something else, but I already know all the keybinds and it just does everything I want. My absolute favorite feature (i'm sure this is present elsewhere too) is the idea that I have my stuff laid out on virtual screens and I can just assign a virtual screen to a physical screen super trivially without ever moving my hands off the keyboard. It's such a wonderful workflow. Tiling WMs are one of those power user things where once you get used to it the other way just seem so obviously bad. VIM and Blender are similar, unfamiliar annoying interface if you're used to the normie way of doing things, but once you understand the patterns and the way you can compose them it becomes so much more expressive.

SubiculumCode 11mo ago

I use remote desktops a lot (e.g. X2go). A lot of issues seem to come up with using Super key combos on the remote desktop. Anyone know of a good solution for that?

zem 11mo ago

my favourite xmonad feature (that distinguished it from the other tiling WMs I've used) is the ability to have empty workspaces. that way I can maintain a persistent mapping of applications to workspaces, with muscle memory for the keybindings to switch to various apps. (also a nice trick I picked up from someone else's config file was to have a "scratch space" desktop with a key binding that either moved to it or moved back to the desktop I came from)

somat 11mo ago
If we are doing a survey I use spectrwm and it has empty/dedicated workspaces. It also has a concept of shared workspaces, windows there are present in all workspaces, used for fleshing out common desktop ui docks and the like. I have to admit that while I spent a couple of hours figuring it out one day, It turns out I prefer a really thin/bare desktop so don't use it. Spectrwm is not well known, but it fits this sweet spot between super simple with few moving parts yet still configurable enough to work the way I want to. far simpler than xmonad or even I3 but with better defaults and more easily configurable than dwm.
- zem 11mo ago
  does it integrate well with any desktop environment? that was the other killer feature of xmonad for me, it worked well with MATE and kde until the wayland switch. I ultimately switched to cosmic because of issues with the (wayland + DE + xmonad) stack, but I do miss the better tiling features of xmonad.
  - somat 11mo ago
    Unfortunately I don't really know, I mean as far as I can tell gnome or kde programs run fine, but I am not running any of background tooling that normally goes with a full desktop environment.

deleted 11mo ago

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lone-cloud 11mo ago

At the risk of sounding like a linux snob, I highly question OP's taste: - recommending X11 WM/DE over Wayland in 2025 is nasty work - 7.3/8 GB swap usage? mad man - bash? meh. integrated GPU? meh - 4k packages installed seems super excessive (I'm at 887 (pacman)) - that topbar has way too much superfluous info and looks bad. I guess it's nice if you frequently forget which timezone you're in and need to know how fast the wind is outside?

errantmind 11mo ago

The best part about choosing a simple WM is you never have to think about it again. I installed and configured DWM many years ago and it just works. Never had a single issue after the first week. It is like when you buy an appliance and it just fades into the background and then, one day, you realize you've had it for 10 years without any problems and you feel a tinge of gratitude before moving on with your day.

nicklaf 11mo ago
Same story here. After installing dwm years ago, I've more or less stopped thinking about window managers as an open problem to be solved. I suppose one could run into trouble if they started patching it a lot, but in my experience you don't need to do that.

zenethian 11mo ago

> When I was still using Manjaro Linux back in 2019, I got a nudge to try i3wm. It was my first experience with any window manager Is the author saying that until 2019 they used Linux on the desktop without using X?

ratrocket 11mo ago
I read it to mean the author used "desktop environments" prior to that, so KDE or Gnome, as opposed to a "bare" window manager.

Duanemclemore 11mo ago

When I got back on Linux as a daily driver a year ago I knew I wanted to be on a tiling / dynamic window manager. I started with i3 and really like the keybindings. A couple months later I found out about xmonad through general interest in the subject. I installed it, found someone's config to use i3 keybinds (which I was used to at that point) and had a lot of fun. It's definitely quick as heck and I like how compact the codebase is for edits. Plus, it gave me an excuse to learn some rudimentary Haskell. My visual setup is always SUPER minimal, as it comes out of the box. So that was nice. Unfortunately I had some serious trouble with X11 and an app my workflow relies on running in wine, so I switched to sway for Wayland (such as it is it fixed the issue). I know some folks from the xmonad community are trying to implement it over Wayland [0], and were it to come to fruition it would be a VERY welcome development. [0] https://discourse.haskell.org/t/xmonad-for-wayland-call-for-help/7812 https://discourse.haskell.org/t/xmonad-for-wayland-call-for-...

jxdxbx 11mo ago

As I expected lots of discussion of scrolling managers in this thread. I'll just say that I think that scrolling windows managers like Niri, which I use, are very well suited for laptops in particular. Tiling WMs always feel cramped on a smaller screen. Plus the touchpad to swipe as navigation fits really well with the paradigm.