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Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet

agent-kilo.github.io

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Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet

#91

Post by weeb »

This looks to have great potential for accessibility! I work with individuals who use eye gaze input, where a significant part of the screen is taken up by an on-screen keyboard (including various shortcut/macro keys as well as for typing). Having tiling options that fit within a smaller part of the screen (e.g. still allow side by side or top/bottom split, but in a smaller total region) would be great. Particularly as Windows 11 has broken vertical docking of appbars.

The UI hints also look promising, but I can't get them working. Using example-config.janet I tried pressing RAlt or RAlt+K and I get the UI hint shortcuts list coming up, but none of them seem to do anything, except in Notepad where I sometimes get the standard UI hints (that always come up here with a long press of left alt)

Fwiw, as a newbie I found it a bit intimidating/off-putting that it doesn't work out the box without choosing a config file. That's quite a lot of extra cognitive effort and link-clicking before you can try it out. And I'm left quite unsure what I'm missing out on. Am I able to access the different documented features with the config file I have? It's not clear.

Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet

#92

Post by 3036e4 »

once_inc wrote: post #87

My experiences with tiling window managers is that they struggle in judging a modal screen like a confirmation box or detachable/dockable mini-containers like the interface of certain programs like GIMP. Considering those as new tile-able windows tends to be a hinderance instead of increasing productivity.

They do struggle with that, or rather some developers struggle with not making assumptions about the way a user's window manager is laying out their windows?

I use StumpWM, and for the few applications that this becomes a real problem it is possible to run those in a floating windows group that works just like a minimalistic non-tiling window manager. I think this is a common features of tiling window managers.

Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet

#93

Post by agentkilo »

weeb wrote: post #91

This looks to have great potential for accessibility! I work with individuals who use eye gaze input, where a significant part of the screen is taken up by an on-screen keyboard (including various shortcut/macro keys as well as for typing). Having tiling options that fit within a smaller part of the screen (e.g. still allow side by side or top/bottom split, but in a smaller total region) would be great. Particularly…

> Having tiling options that fit within a smaller part of the screen (e.g. still allow side by side or top/bottom split, but in a smaller total region) would be great.

Do you mean reserving screen space for the on-screen keyboard? If that's the case, you can try to "transform" the top-level frame (a frame that tracks a monitor's screen area), either in the REPL or in your config: https://agent-kilo.github.io/jwno/cookbook/adjust-top-level-...

> Using example-config.janet I tried pressing RAlt or RAlt+K and I get the UI hint shortcuts list coming up, but none of them seem to do anything

Can you please file a bug report and attach relevant logs? You can write logs to a file by starting Jwno like this:

jwno.exe --log-file C:\jwno.log --log-level debug --no-console your-config.janet

There should be some interesting logs when you press one of the UI hint shortcuts.

> Fwiw, as a newbie I found it a bit intimidating/off-putting that it doesn't work out the box without choosing a config file. That's quite a lot of extra cognitive effort and link-clicking before you can try it out.

I totally understand. But I chose to not include a default config in the executable, because I thought a window manager is a... personal thing. It should evolve with your habits and workflows, so the default config will most likely get changed to something dramatically different anyway. I can be wrong though.

Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet

#94

Post by tveyben »

qingcharles wrote: post #68
pbohun wrote: post #7

This 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).

This is a fantastic replacement for Windows Explorer which is about 10X faster/lighter: https://filepilot.tech/ (it's beta so it has a few little annoyances still)

For files - nothing beats TotalCommander for me.

As mentioned earlier in the thread, keyboard shortcuts are built-in, not missing or bolted on later…!

Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet

#96

Post by Fnoord »

wredcoll wrote: post #65
ang_cire wrote: post #20

Custom 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!

Is it just me or did not a single one of those "l33t haxker shells" ever produceable a single ui innovation that lasted? I mean, I remember there being a whole ton of wildly customized windows shells with menus and floating terminals and so on, but not a single thing stuck around?

Well, I installed Litestep as default shell on a 80486 laptop with Windows (I think it was Windows 98 SE, debloated). It replaced explorer.exe and performed better, IIRC I had more RAM free. I gave the machine away eventually, and they probably ran Linux on it. But because the machine was for my mother, it had to be able to run MSIE.

Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet

#97

Post by whywhywhywhy »

nemomarx wrote: post #52
TeMPOraL wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PowerToys seems to be making two step forward, one step backwards, and then makes a leap in a random off-axis direction. Every time an update comes, I feel both joy and worry - I expect to see some new cool thing (and possibly even useful to me), but I also worry about bloat and random performance degradations. I haven't bothered with measuring and quantifying it properly, but I do feel PowerToys got heavier and slow…

Even lighter than autohotkey is remapping on the hardware of the keyboard. There's a lot of open source firmware options for that now in the custom scene

Yeah I found all the software based remapping to be a bit janky on Windows, ended up just doing it in the keyboard firmware instead to move my ctrl keys beside the spacebar.

Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet

#98

Post by weeb »

agentkilo wrote: post #93
weeb wrote: post #91

This looks to have great potential for accessibility! I work with individuals who use eye gaze input, where a significant part of the screen is taken up by an on-screen keyboard (including various shortcut/macro keys as well as for typing). Having tiling options that fit within a smaller part of the screen (e.g. still allow side by side or top/bottom split, but in a smaller total region) would be great. Particularly…

> Having tiling options that fit within a smaller part of the screen (e.g. still allow side by side or top/bottom split, but in a smaller total region) would be great. Do you mean reserving screen space for the on-screen keyboard? If that's the case, you can try to "transform" the top-level frame (a frame that tracks a monitor's screen area), either in the REPL or in your config: https://agent-kilo.github.io/jwno/coo…

Yes! transforming the top level frame sounds like the way to go.

I ran jwno with example-config and pressed RAlt and RAlt+K a few times, each time trying one of the onscreen shortcut keys (b, c, d, etc). Log at the bottom of this comment. At the end of the process I was left in a state where pressing Space triggered a context menu in my title bar, and I couldn't type space in the app (e.g. in Notepad or Terminal) which I think is due to one of the Alts ending up being held down? It persisted after leaving Jwno

Log: https://ctxt.io/2/AAB4W5O7Fg

Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet

#99

Post by agentkilo »

weeb wrote: post #98
agentkilo wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having tiling options that fit within a smaller part of the screen (e.g. still allow side by side or top/bottom split, but in a smaller total region) would be great. Do you mean reserving screen space for the on-screen keyboard? If that's the case, you can try to "transform" the top-level frame (a frame that tracks a monitor's screen area), either in the REPL or in your config: https://agent-kilo.github.io/jwno/coo…

Yes! transforming the top level frame sounds like the way to go. I ran jwno with example-config and pressed RAlt and RAlt+K a few times, each time trying one of the onscreen shortcut keys (b, c, d, etc). Log at the bottom of this comment. At the end of the process I was left in a state where pressing Space triggered a context menu in my title bar, and I couldn't type space in the app (e.g. in Notepad or Terminal) whi…

Thanks! I created a tracking issue here: https://github.com/agent-kilo/jwno/issues/12

Meanwhile you can try to change leading `RAlt` to something else, like `Win + H`, and see if it works. There may be a bug that gets triggered when only modifier keys are mapped.

Re: Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet

#100

Post by igouy »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #89
behnamoh wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I now realized this should be easily fixable with external tooling - i.e. in Emacs/SLIME. What I think they need is a better way of keeping an audit trail. Capturing and persisting as much of the transient interactions you did as possible, letting you revisit them after and easily transfer into code or tests. To some extent, undotree on neovim allows this because it offers a drastically different view on what "undo…

That's the other thing. Version control is tricky with image-based systems. I won't say impossible, I never looked deeply into what Smalltalk/Pharo folks are doing, but since between playing with Pharo and Glamorous Toolkit I saw Git being integrated first-class into one of them, I imagine someone has some idea how to deal with the problem. What I meant though isn't collaborative/historical tracking, I meant day-to-d…

> Version control is tricky with image-based systems

Back in the day:

"ENVY/Manager augments this model by providing configuration management and version control facilities. All code is stored in a central database rather than in files associated with a particular image. Developers are continuously connected to this database; therefore changes are immediately visible to all developers."

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mastering_ENVY_Develope...

These days:

"Package files are simple text files, encoded for latin alphabet (ISO 8859-15) and handled without problems by GitHub. Cuis-Smalltalk uses the LF (ascii code 10) newline convention, as preferred in GitHub. This allows Git/GitHub to diff versions, and merge branches."

https://drcuis.github.io/TheCuisBook/Daily-Workflow.html

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