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Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
31–40 of 112 posts
Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
#32This is so cool! It's funny because open source devs are making Windows better while MS is actively making it worse. If MS removed all telemetry and AI (and restored win10 functions in context menus), I would probably move back to it. I've recently started playing around with Janet, and it's a great language. I think it's inspired by Clojure and Lua, and somehow manages to be better than both (in my opinion).
> I think it's inspired by Clojure and Lua, and somehow manages to be better than both This is exactly how I feel about Janet too. I don't think I have enough experience on Clojure or Lua to comment on them, but I got attracted to Janet almost immediately. Working on Jwno also confirms my first impression on Janet: It's really a practical language. The tooling has some room for improvement, but the language itself ca…
How’s the REPL/interactive editing story? I feel weird using a Lisp that is not as interactive as Racket, Scheme or Common Lisp. Running scripts from the REPL ain’t the same thing as C-x C-e an expression on a live program
Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
#33How does it compare to komorebi? I've been using it for about 5 months with great success. I'm a Hyprland user when I'm on my personal machine, but for windows Komorebi has let me keep my muscle memory and workflow largely intact.
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Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
#34Whoa, very cool. I love WMs, I love Lisp, and I hate Windows. This seems to be a perfect "medicine" for my frustration with it.
Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
#35I'm curious, did you find there were things that were easier to do because it's Janet/lisp-like language? Or you just fancied like using it (perfectly valid reason of course!). I tried various lisp dialects, but I could never find the killer feature vs other languages I already use. And I can justify why I use these specific languages I do use, if that makes sense.
> I could never find the killer feature vs other languages I already use.
You're kidding or trolling? Structural editing and the REPL are the greatest features of Lisp. The ability to just grab any expression and move it around simplifies so many things when coding and refactoring. With the connected REPL you can eval anything on the spot, that turns the entire experience of coding into a video game — you don't need to wait for linter, linker, compiler — you just run things. You often don't even have to save anything. I suspect when you "tried various lisp dialects" maybe you didn't use structural editing and the connected REPL?
Often people confuse Lisp REPL with REPLs in other programming languages, e.g. Python, where usually you have to copy-n-paste chunks of code into it. Lisp's REPLs are different in the sense that every step in Read-Eval-Print-Loop is different — in Lisp, you typically eval things right where you type them, by sending whole expressions to the connected REPL, which could be remote. We (for example) run ours in a Kubernetes cluster, that allows us to experiment with pods, running queries against the "real" DB tables, testing services "live".
Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
#36Custom windows shells (I know this is just a window manager, but still) in the year of our lord 2025? This takes me back to the days of installing bb4win and litestep in XP. I'm a kid again!
TIL bbLean [1] still works in Windows 11! Currently digging through my archives for my old BB4Win styles repository [1] https://bb4win.sourceforge.net/bblean/
Wow, bb4win and bblean take me way back. In fact, they were a huge inspiration for my shells[1] feature, which are just userland programs that happen to be able to manage panels (windows).
Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
#37It's not a tiling manager but slightly related: I replicated Spectacle/Rectangle (macOS apps) on Windows a while ago to snap windows to edges/corners/two-thirds/one-thirds etc a while back. If you're interested: https://github.com/ahmetb/RectangleWin/blob/main/README.md
Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
#38I always disliked the chaos that happens quickly with application windows, and loved the idea of tiling. But none of them really worked for me practically until I found PaperWM around a year ago or so (gnome extension). It has few core shortcuts and feels more natural. Like you would really arrange applications directly on your desk. It does not limit itself by your screen width and has the nice default that a new window appears to the right of the current window (configurable). You seldomly have the need to re-arrange windows, because the default just fits 99% of all cases. In addition, you still have the comfort of gnome. No hacky config files just to get wifi working or so. For work we have OSX, and I am really missing it there (I am using rectangle there instead). https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM?tab=readme-ov-file#usage
Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Janet is quite...liberal? It's a practical language, but doesn't force a specific paradigm on you. There're "escape hatches" in different levels of the language, and I like that. Maybe the most "opinionated" things in Janet are the ev stuff and fibers. I think they're done right though, you just need to be careful with the event loop when embedding Janet.
How it compares with Lua?
Strictly better unless you need an extremely small runtime rather than a very small one, or are exposing a scripting API to users who will recoil from prefix notation.
Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
#40Custom windows shells (I know this is just a window manager, but still) in the year of our lord 2025? This takes me back to the days of installing bb4win and litestep in XP. I'm a kid again!
>litestep
Brings back memories !