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A Tiling Desktop Environment

bitcannon.net

41–50 of 143 posts

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#41
As a fellow Awesome WM user my "solution" to this is two Git repos - one to set up the system using Puppet, and one with user configuration such as rc.lua. I've got to basically the same list as OP plus

* low power warnings from cbatticon and

* very basic colour management " rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/victor-engmark/tilde/blob/6a890f649dd4810....

Building a proper DE around a decent tiling WM (or separating out the quality-of-life parts of KDE/GNOME) would be fantastic.

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#42
post #15

I so agree with this, though I have a slightly different take. As someone who can't part with my GUIs, I'm nevertheless super jealous of all the i3 folks. As such, what I want is basically i3 in a gnome window. That for me would be the best of both worlds. I can do all my fancy i3 stuff but still have a crisp, efficient UI to get settings/stuff done when it's about ease of use, not speed.

You could go the other way - i3 supports floating windows, so you could default to floating, or have default vary by program.

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#43
post #7

I've never understood why macOS has never included the functionality of, say, Divvy or chunkwm. I'd like to easily be able to tile my desktop via a keyboard command. Also, I've never quite understood what macOS people have against snapping the edges of windows to each other or the edge of the screen. Sometimes I want to divide the workspace into 3 or 4 windows and maximise my use of screen real estate. It's trivial t…

Because Apple hasn't invented tiling windows yet? It'll be revolutionary when it does, though, I'm sure.

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#44
I'm working on some sort of tiling wm but for the web. It's still pretty basic in terms of browsers, but already nice if you want to use it to display websites that don't change often. It's based on Electron. You can get it here https://github.com/Merkoba/Boneless -- Also there's this video that shows a bit how it looks right now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg_3_YoVlk8

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#45
post #7

I've never understood why macOS has never included the functionality of, say, Divvy or chunkwm. I'd like to easily be able to tile my desktop via a keyboard command. Also, I've never quite understood what macOS people have against snapping the edges of windows to each other or the edge of the screen. Sometimes I want to divide the workspace into 3 or 4 windows and maximise my use of screen real estate. It's trivial t…

My take is that Apple kind of invented the overlapping windows paradigm, the Xerox Alto didn’t have that concept, IIRC. Also, dragging something from the desktop and dropping on a floating window was a major breakthrough, which is kind of incompatible with a split screen model. Personally, on small screens like the original Mac, I think the floating/overlapping WM worked perfectly. On a 30” however, it’s a bit silly.

  Apple kind of invented the overlapping windows paradigm
They preceded the X Window System?

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#46
post #15

I so agree with this, though I have a slightly different take. As someone who can't part with my GUIs, I'm nevertheless super jealous of all the i3 folks. As such, what I want is basically i3 in a gnome window. That for me would be the best of both worlds. I can do all my fancy i3 stuff but still have a crisp, efficient UI to get settings/stuff done when it's about ease of use, not speed.

i feel like i know where you're coming from here, this isn't exactly what you're describing, but it's pretty dang close. really made the transition to window tiling far less intimidating than i imagined.

https://regolith-linux.org/

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#47

Like the author, I've spent years in tiling WM's (xmonad, awesome, dwm, i3). Right now I'm hanging around big DE's like kde, gnome, windows 10, osx + magnet. Windows 10 snapping keyboard keys are top tier. Not automated tiling, but save so much time. Also the GUI is beautiful on whatever screen you plug it into (including 4k). On Linux DE's right now? Mint or gnome will show options to scale up 200%, 300%, 400%(!) Ev…

being able to divvy up a desktop into 4 quarter panel windows on win10 with near zero effort absolutely changed my life, i think of how much time i've wasted clicking back and forth between two windows stacked on eachother, or having to manually move/size windows to be next to eachother... i dunno. i held out as long as i could before caving to a 10 upgrade out of necessity, and it's a shame that windows has built such a stigma like that because (once you go in and rip out all the junk) it's clear microsoft has decided to embrace alot of conventions paved by linux/unix/gnu/whatever - little things like recognizing shift+ins as a 'paste' command - and has really improved desktop management overall.

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#48
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a recent i3 convert (been using it full time for the better part of a year now). It's one of those little changes that really brought me a lot of satisfaction. This is on my primary desktop (with a 4k display). I recommend it to anyone who's in a rut with their workflow (learn about all the mods, i3-gaps, etc.) - it takes about a day to properly customize and get used to, time well spent.

I have had a tough time getting my 4k ext display to properly scale with i3. I tried arandr but the fonts are too small. With scaling , Emacs, Firefox and alacritty seem to be ok but things seem sluggish on my x230. How did you do it ?

I'm on a pretty big monitor (~40 inches) for development, so I don't actually do any scaling for this display. I'm spoiled with a pretty good desktop rig, so I haven't had to do any optimization in a while.

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#49
post #7

I've never understood why macOS has never included the functionality of, say, Divvy or chunkwm. I'd like to easily be able to tile my desktop via a keyboard command. Also, I've never quite understood what macOS people have against snapping the edges of windows to each other or the edge of the screen. Sometimes I want to divide the workspace into 3 or 4 windows and maximise my use of screen real estate. It's trivial t…

When you resize a window in MacOS it is already builtin that it is aware of the edges of inactive windows. The edges of the active window you are resizing will very lightly snap to the edges of other windows, such that is nearly impossible to make two windows either separated or overlapping by only a couple pixels.

It's too bad that there isn't at least a hidden property in `defaults` to adjust the intensity of the snapping. Hammerspoon and Karabiner work well for the type of audience found on HN, but coding your own customizations can seem like a lot of work, and there are still some unnecessary limitations to what you can do.

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#50
I feel like a shill with how often I recommend it, but Keyboard Maestro [0] seems like it would handle almost everything, from window management to all sorts of system automation. The kinds of things I can execute with a key command is amazing. Sometimes, I'll just write a quick task, like realigning titles across a set of Keynote slides or very specific text manipulation operations. Seriously, best money I've ever spent on software (if I had to go without any tool, from Sublime Text to Photoshop to Logic Pro X, KM would be the one I couldn't live without, and other than Logic, I actually use the others day to day for work, and I'd still give them up to keep KM).

[0] http://keyboardmaestro.com

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