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A Tiling Desktop Environment

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Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#61
post #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 o…

Yes, it would be nice if more tiling window manager power users would make available their configs like Luke Smith is doing with LARBS (https://larbs.xyz/).

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#62
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the dozen users checking in. My favorite feature of ion/notion is the alt-space scratch pad. I always have a bunch of ad-hoc terminals or other programs open that I can easily reach from any desktop. So far I haven't seen any other tiling wm that has something similar. I'm probably wrong though.

i did that with xmonad - set up alt-` to either switch to desktop 10, or if i was on desktop 10, to switch back to the previous desktop.

That's certainly an interesting idea. Thanks!

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#63
For me the right balance is installing i3 on a system with GNOME installed as well. I get all the GNOME apps working well together, but my window manager looks and works the way I want it to. The only issue is configuring some of the GNOME apps (GNOME Online Accounts), where I have to convince Control Center that it's running under GNOME. Spawning the polkit agent and some of the other GNOME components works pretty well too. I just wish I could get the nice GNOME toolbar rather than my polybar (which I like, but took far too long to get working the way I wanted).

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#64

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…

It seemed like there was actually quarter tiling in GNOME coming in, but the patches sadly died.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=751857

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#65
For those who want good sides of tiling DE but won't want to install tiling WM, there is Openbox. If you aren't afraid of editing configuration XML, you can assign hotkeys to place windows in quarters/halves of the display or to jump them between displays. Also Openbox is very fast. It can be used in place of XFCEs or KDEs own WM, so nothing stops you from having benefits of full-fledged DE along with powerful WM. That being said, Openbox lacks shadows or transparency (so separate compositor like xcompmgr or compton is needed) and doesn't render rounded corners. I use XFCE + Openbox combo at my workplace for 5 years now.

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#66
post #33

All you linux veterans may cringe at it, but maybe check out my dotfiles. I have spent years cultivating a complete DE experience around dwm. It shouldn't be too hard to drop in your wm of choice. I have used it with HiDPI but only briefly, so that may still be imperfect. https://github.com/AeliusSaionji/dotfiles

Thanks for sharing! Would be nice if you'd wrap it into some auto-ricing script like LARBS.

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#67
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…

> Also, I've never quite understood what macOS people have against snapping the edges

My go to example to explain this is the “The many windows of John Siracusa” podcast from ATP a few years ago.

The relevant discussion starts at 1:33:00

https://atp.fm/episodes/96

Siracusa, who grew up as a (classic) Mac user, explains his tiling and overlapping habits to Arment and Liss, who grew up as Microsoft Windows users and later switched, and they gasp in utter horror, shock and awe.

For example Siracusa says he currently has a dozen terminal windows open, and also a couple browser windows, normal for him, in BBEdit he regularly hits 20-40; they ask him if he doesn’t know about tabs and he replies “Oh, I love tabs! Of course every Window has many tabs!”. How would he manage/organize hundreds of tabs in multiple applications with a snapping tiling manager? He can’t. It is fun from there. Like, he jokes after a work day (week) his desktop also has “sedimentary layers”.

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#68

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…

Same here. I finally realized I really feel at home with macOS, expose, the dock and Spectacle, so I'm using xfce, skippy and plank. I wrote a bunch of scripts to resize windows to the left and right halves of screen, then to about 70% horizontal size, and assigned them to shortcuts in xfce.

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#69
I use Moom on the Mac, Openbox on Linux, and the default Windows 10 tiling keys. Since I don’t like auto-tiling and prefer managing workspaces and tiles interactively, this works well for me, with consistent key bindings across platforms.

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#70

I installed the [i3 edition of Manjaro]( https://manjaro.org/download/i3/ ) last weekend. I was up and running with a beautiful environment providing most of the listed utilities in an hour or so. I have been incredibly happy with the setup. The edition could still use some more love (e.g., I had to set up auto-mounting and HiDPI compatible configs myself), but it is remarkably cohesive and (relatively) easy to get g…

How does Manjaro compare to Ubuntu for the “new user seamless install of everything” and “easy update for new users”

Kubuntu -> Manjaro KDE was a transition I made when I was still distro-hopping. I used Octopi as a pacman GUI which was super easy to use compared to Kubuntu's. Now that I've learned how to use pacman, I've still never had issues with a -Syu on either my Manjaro i3 or Arch systems, but I don't use Octopi anymore.
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