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Sway 1.0

drewdevault.com

121–130 of 256 posts

Re: Sway 1.0

#121
post #115
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In what sense does Wayland have better hidpi support than X?

Re: Sway 1.0

#122

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?

Better default window behavior. I do not need to use a mouse with i3.

Re: Sway 1.0

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't get the benefit of a tiling window manager. I tried one and instantly felt boxed in. There's not enough room on the screen for everything I need to have opened and flip between, which is why I use an overlapping window manager in the first place.

The one place where I prefer stacking window managers is that I can have a transparent terminal/editor floating over the docs. Stacking things on top of each other while being able to see all of them is pretty nice.

> I can have a transparent terminal/editor floating over the docs

Easily done even with a tiling WM. E.g. I have a keybinding which allows me switching between tiling and floating of a window.

Re: Sway 1.0

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't accept that it isn't immediately obvious that tiling is more efficient than dragging to maximize real estate on a single workspace. If someone wants to use an inferior method because that's what they are comfortable with that is fine. Just don't assert that the two are equal without some reasoned argument.

Some windows are more efficient to use when they are a certain size or shape, such as where text is made to wrap at a comfortable width for reading. Efficiency of screen pixel usage isn't the only factor affecting efficiency of the interface in practice.

You can resize, tab, and float windows in sway. You can also scale individual applications. There's nothing you can do with dragging that you can't do in sway faster with less presses and with saner defaults.

Re: Sway 1.0

#126

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. I…

https://swaywm.org should cover this right?

Re: Sway 1.0

#127

This is huge news. Sway is absolutely incredible, it puts macOS, built by Apple's army of engineers and dump trucks of money to shame in its simplicity, stability, and efficiency. If you want the best of the best DE, look no further. If you're on the fence about trying a tiling windows manager, I say, give it a shot for a single week and you'll never look back. Invest a few hours in a sway config file that will serve…

I really don't get the benefit of a tiling window manager. I tried one and instantly felt boxed in. There's not enough room on the screen for everything I need to have opened and flip between, which is why I use an overlapping window manager in the first place.

With a tiling window manager, every window you open has cognitive overload. Which workspace, which location on screen, is it okay if other windows resize, or do I have it float even? Every tile you add affects the other tiles in some way - at the very least a new tile (e.g. on a new workspace) consumes space that cannot be taken by other tiles. The reward for this additional cognitive load is that every action is concious - reducing a lot of the mess that can pile while using a comptuer. This makes them incredibly suitable for people whose computer use is predictable, organized and focused on quick parallel tasks. I understand why so many developers use them.

With a stacking window manager, the cognitive overhead of opening a window is much less. You open a program, get a window with focus somewhere. You can start doing your thing immediately without considering window management. Every new window on the stack doesn't affect the others you were using. Subsequently organizing the layout of your windows to be optimized for your current workload however takes more time. This appears to me to make stacking window managers to be more suited for people whose computer use is more dynamic or less organized - people can open and close stuff on a whim.

More organized vs. less cognitive load can be both a personal preference or a workload dependant thing. In case of tiling WMs it also doesn't help that they tend to have very low discoverability and depend almost exclusively on keyboard shortcuts versus GUI elements, only adding to their newbie-unfriendliness. I think that's also telling about the use cases tiling WMs are popular for.

I see a lot of people that respond to you by appealing to some objective superiority of tiling window managers, but there's advantages and disadvantages to both.

Re: Sway 1.0

#128

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…

Personally for the most part I only have one application per workspace, and switch workspaces frequently. I often have several terminals on one workspace, though. I don't regularly use any GUI applications other than qutebrowser (web browser) and alacritty (terminal emulator).

how do you do password management? I setup Sway/qutebrowser last week and love it, but the lack of password management extensions was crippling. I reverted to Firefox + Vimium, which has been a subpar experience to qutebrowser.

from what I understand the team on qutebrowser is actively working on an API for addons, but in the meantime it's a nonstarter for me.

thank you for your contributions, by the way.

Re: Sway 1.0

#129
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tiling window managers were tried early on, when PCs were introduced. They failed because normal people didn't like them. Also, mobile OSes won't really ever have more than 2-3 windows shown at the same time, since the screens are so small. That will probably change once we have folding devices or AR/VR. But super limited "tiling" window managers do make sense with such limited UIs.

> They failed because normal people didn't like them. Do you have proof of this? I suspect they failed because everyone decided to copy the Mac which was trying to emulate a real desktop with bits of paper on it. > Super limited "tiling" window managers do make sense with such limited UIs. They also often make sense for complicated UIs, e.g. IDEs such as Visual Studio and browsers such as Firefox, which have docked s…

Tabs are a completely different metaphor to tiles.

Re: Sway 1.0

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the opposite feeling. I feel like I'm in a trash dump when I use an overlapping window manager, and have to sort through the pile to find what I need. Tiling window managers perhaps make more sense for devs or other professionals who use several of the same applications every day and know what window and pane they will be on, and can switch quickly with keystrokes. That being said, once you internalize the mode…

What I usually want to do is just click and resize to something that "feels right" for each of my programs, and then flip between them as needed, then resize again later as I workflow progresses. Often I want some important text from one to be visible while I'm working in another (thus overlapping), so I jockey them around until it feels right, and go.

You might like the minimal tiling present in CWM (and likely other window managers, too). Basically, it is a regular old overlapping window manager but with keyboard commands as the primary control. If you have two or more windows you want to see on the screen at the same time tiling style, simply press the hotkey for either vertical or horizontal (Super+v for me). When I want to open a terminal window on top of a browser, pressing Super+enter puts it at the mouse cursor, scaled to the application’s default size.

For many terminal windows or one Emacs and one terminal, I might use tiling, but I can still overlap whenever it makes more sense. Plus, the consistent keyboard controls (I use a config pretty similar to https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/openbsd-on-a-laptop/#cwm) make me more efficient than a mouse interface.

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