Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sway 1.0

drewdevault.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 256 posts

Re: Sway 1.0

#111

Post by lfms_dotfile »

kstenerud wrote: post #60
mattbreeden wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if you were aware by your comments, but in a tiling window manager you don't have to have everything visible all the time. They all have modes that hide windows behind others and allow you to swap between them the same as alt-tab. Many of them also have the option to 'float' the windows as a normal non tiling window manager would.

But then I fail to see what benefit it's giving me to be a tiling window manager?

That's simply an option, because the devs recognize that not everything adheres well to a tiling workflow. It's not intended to be the primary mode of operation. I personally almost never use floating mode.

Re: Sway 1.0

#112

Post by xnevs »

williamdclt wrote: post #99

I like the idea of tiling window managers but never got the use for it. 99% of my time is spent between my browser, my IDE and my terminal. A half-size browser is painful to work with, I need it full screen. Same for IDE. Same for terminal, I do need multiple terminals but I want them together. I also have another workspace for chat stuff (browser with whatsapp, slack, messenger) and another for random apps (spotify…

For me, even with very few windows open (but more than 2) a tiling window manager is superior because of the keyboard-driven directional navigation (Super+[hjkl]) instead of the unidirectional Cmd+Tab.

Re: Sway 1.0

#113

Post by the_gipsy »

hnra wrote: post #64
the_gipsy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you want to go to an app. You just hope that some corner is peeking out of that huge unsorted pile of windows. You call that good UX or is it just a formed habit?

There are more ways than clicking a window to give it focus. Alt-Tab being the obvious once but also Win+{Nr} on Windows if I recall correctly.

Alt-tab works fine as "go back to last window", but that could just be a specific shortcut.

Using it to cycle through a pile of apps shown as icons or screenshots is terrible UX, IMHO.

Re: Sway 1.0

#114

Post by slashink »

Really exciting to see this released!

Is there a good distro to run this on? I run Ubuntu at home but from my understanding, adding Sway to Ubuntu seems non-trivial. Is there a good distro I can switch to that supports Sway?

Re: Sway 1.0

#115

Post by pzone »

mises wrote: post #39
ubercow13 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should you (upgrade from i3/X)? What's the benefit?

Based on Wayland, meaning it's more modern. Here's what I've heard for benefits: * Better multi-window and gesture support * Gaps built in (currently, i3 is separate from i3-gaps, which is what most actually use). No separate forks to deal with, meaning easier maintenance. * Wallpaper * Faster However, there are some big downsides. Wayland is still pretty beta, and not everything works well with it. This is not the f…

I think you have it backwards with regard to HiDPI. DPI scaling in X is a nightmare. Sway claims to have the best HiDPI support of any desktop environment due to modern Wayland support. Getting X applications to scale with Wayland HiDPI will require workarounds because of the lack of DPI support in X.

Re: Sway 1.0

#116

Post by e12e »

mikenew wrote: post #87
Memosyne wrote: post #29

What's the status of blurry XWayland applications on HiDPI screens? I tried to replace i3 with sway a couple months ago and couldn't get VSCode to look decent with scaling.

Current status: still sucks, unfortunately. From what I've seen the developers have more-or-less decided that it would be a lot of effort to get scaling and input to work correctly for X applications with HiDPI, and they'd rather work on new things, not supporting old things. Which I certainly understand, but it kills the experience for most applications that I tend to use. So I can't really switch until that changes…

Is this only a problem with x11 apps? If so, I'm a little surprised there's not a Wayland based build for Electron that'd make it easy to fix the issue for vscode?

Hm, looks like the branch/subproject in chrome is "ozone" and some work is ongoing there:

https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/9056

https://github.com/Igalia/chromium/tree/ozone-wayland-dev

Re: Sway 1.0

#117

Post by peteforde »

Congrats on the release! You should be very proud of what your movement has accomplished.

I want to highlight something that I appreciate in your release post, which is the short explanation between paragraphs 1 & 2:

"Sway is an i3-compatible Wayland desktop for Linux and FreeBSD"

One of my major peeves with OSS projects is the tendency to adopt an "if you're reading this, you already know what this is for" stance. It's not just elitist... it's a missed opportunity to bring passers-by into the fold.

It might seem dull or repetitive to people that are deep in the trees to see layman explanations, but at least linking to them is a small but appreciated nod of respect to people who are just coming online.

To this end, I would challenge that you could set an amazing example that goes further towards accomplishing these goals by linking the words in that description to readable explanations of what the words mean in the context of this project. Your goal should be to move beyond what Sway is and perhaps start with why Sway exists. It's clear that this is important, but someone coming in has no idea what motivated you and your army of contributors to stop other important projects and build this. Where does it fit into the concepts that they are already familiar with? What other technologies does it replace? What can I do with this that I couldn't do before? Are there tradeoffs to using this over other solutions? Are there situations where I shouldn't use this? And eventually: are there newer projects that Sway inspires which are even better that I should probably be using instead?

If we look at your explanation in this new light, "Sway is an i3-compatible Wayland desktop for Linux and FreeBSD", you can see that it's opaque to people who aren't already familiar. i3... you mean like the Intel i3? What's Wayland? I use Ubuntu... isn't that my desktop? I heard MacOS is based on FreeBSD, so can I use this on a Mac?

These aren't problems, they are opportunities to be a hero to the silent majority of people who have no freaking clue what a tiling window manager is or why it might be applicable to them.

Re: Sway 1.0

#118

Post by ubercow13 »

xnevs wrote: post #112
williamdclt wrote: post #99

I like the idea of tiling window managers but never got the use for it. 99% of my time is spent between my browser, my IDE and my terminal. A half-size browser is painful to work with, I need it full screen. Same for IDE. Same for terminal, I do need multiple terminals but I want them together. I also have another workspace for chat stuff (browser with whatsapp, slack, messenger) and another for random apps (spotify…

For me, even with very few windows open (but more than 2) a tiling window manager is superior because of the keyboard-driven directional navigation (Super+[hjkl]) instead of the unidirectional Cmd+Tab.

Openbox has the same type of directional window navigation based on the relative positions of the floating windows

Re: Sway 1.0

#119

Post by filereaper »

Longtime user of i3, looking forward to sway becoming fully adopted.

I won't be switching to sway anytime soon as I really need support for screen-capture and video-sharing (i.e Zoom and Google Hangouts) to share my code screen for walkthroughs with my remote colleagues.

I effectively downgraded from Ubuntu 18.04 to the more stable 16.04 due to the lack of above support.

I see the following in the release notes:

>A real time screen capture protocol has been developed and implemented (which allows for future third-party screenshot and video capture tools)

Waiting with baited breath till support for it is fully fleshed out.

Cheers.

Re: Sway 1.0

#120

Post by rashkov »

williamdclt wrote: post #99

I like the idea of tiling window managers but never got the use for it. 99% of my time is spent between my browser, my IDE and my terminal. A half-size browser is painful to work with, I need it full screen. Same for IDE. Same for terminal, I do need multiple terminals but I want them together. I also have another workspace for chat stuff (browser with whatsapp, slack, messenger) and another for random apps (spotify…

I've got all my consoles set up to only open in workspace #1, my text editors open in workspace #2, my work browser in workspace #3, and my distractions browser & slack open in workspace #9. All of these things are a keystroke away. Within each of those workspaces, I am one keystroke away from: 1) tiling all windows to see them at once, or 2) Make them all full screen and flip between them with the equivalent of alt-tab.

None of this requires the mouse and so it all quickly becomes muscle memory. I don't really have to search for anything because it's automatically managed into neat piles within their own workspaces.

I also effectively get 10 times the desktop real-estate compared with a non-tiling window manager, because I'm more likely to use all 10 workspaces when switching between them is a matter of pressing command+{workspace number}.

Post reply on HN