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Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

material-shell.com

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Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#111

My biggest issue with i3 and awesome is as soon as I plug in a second monitor the whole things just falls apart and it becomes too much to manage. Anyone try this with multiple monitors?

The way multiple monitors work out of the box is that a workspace is created when you first switch to it on the monitor that is focused. This means that even if you always use foo on monitor bar you must switch to monitor bar before hitting the hotkey to switch to foo.

If all you know is focus directional hotkeys you could trivially have to hit focus left 7 times to get to the left monitor for example before hitting super+3 to switch to 3. This is of course horrible.

Your life would be simplified if you had a hotkey to focus output right and focus output left. This makes it not TOO laborious however your life would be simplified MUCH MUCH more if you used the assign directive to assign particular workspaces to particular monitors for example 1-5 on left monitor and 6-0 on right.

You would accomplish this for example by using

    workspace 1 output name
    workspace 2 output name
    ...
Then if you watch to switch to 3 on left monitor you don't have to worry about where you are presently you can simply hit super+3 wherever you are.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#112

My biggest issue with i3 and awesome is as soon as I plug in a second monitor the whole things just falls apart and it becomes too much to manage. Anyone try this with multiple monitors?

Been using i3 daily with 3 monitors and no problem (2 external screens + laptop) for 10 years now.

What is your problem exactly?

I usually reserve [0] for the laptop, [1], [2], [3] and [4] for my left monitor, and [5] on my right monitor.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#113
The word "modern" is really overused in tech, and it doesn't really tell you all that much, just that "this is better because it's new, and new stuff is better than old stuff".

Consider a more descriptive word, such as: - minimal - streamlined - sleek - simple - opinionated - spatial - comprehensive

etc...

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#114
post #36

Tried it briefly, I currently use i3 on ubuntu and found it to be much much slower than that, the animations while pretty get pretty jarring once u start switching windows too often. I much prefer the i3 style of just showing a blinking cursor on switching windows. The grid layout is interesting but I found it strange that the all tabs are shown along the left side in split mode. It would be interesting to see how th…

I Ctrl+F'ed in this thread for Regolith, this should be higher.

Zero setup, incredible keybindings.

You can install it on top of your existing Distro, as an apt package. And then log out + log back in using new DE.

I had never used a tiling WM before Regolith, i3 seemed too difficult to configure for someone who didn't truly didn't understand the point/benefit of using tiling WM's.

A day into using Regolith on Ubuntu I was hooked. Been using it for years now and it's the best decision I've ever made, productivity skyrocketed and it looks nice.

I tried Pop_OS shell's tiling WM, as I was hopeful, but the keybindings and behavior aren't as nice as Regolith. It does a "swap" animation when changing tile positioning that slows stuff down, and I could never get the gap borders to disappear completely.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#116

As an i3-gaps user... I would try this.

I love how beautiful i3-gaps is. I worked awfully hard to get i3, Dunst, Polybar and many other tools to give me a WM only experience. And frankly, I hate that part of it. Simple things like configuring bluetooth, or switching audio... or working with multiple displays are just painful. I expected this when I started using Linux in 1996ish. That was part of the hobbiest experience. These days, I just want to get my w…

I did start using i3 with Xephyr (Xnest at the time) inside gnome. That could be something you want to try.

It basically allows you to have a X11 window running i3 inside your usual gnome session. While in full-screen, that gave me a gnome workspace that was effectively i3.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#117

Trying this out as it's typed. For background: I really want to love tools like i3 or awesome, but I always go back to Gnome because it juts gets stuff done. I liked Gnome 2, I like 3. So: just like the site says. Top is the taskbar, which also has a left icon for the current tiling pattern (fullscreen, tiled vertically, etc). The left side panel starts at the top-left with the search button that does the Gnome activ…

I use cinnamon, for that very reason. Just works, and works well for my use case, is very stable, and I've no wish to learn and configure another desktop paradigm.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#118
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting. Microsoft agreed with this philosophy and fought tooth and nail against tabbing in browsers, opting instead that each browser tab be it's own window and accessible from the task bar. After all other browsers had switched, they were forced to introduce that in IE as well. The worst offender here is OSX. I still haven't figured out a good way to switch between multiple open windows of the same applica…

Just press Command-` to switch between windows of the same application. Command-Tab to switch between windows of other applications.

I got so used to this I made M-` switch between frames in emacs on Windows (work environment).

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#120
Pop Shell from System76 also does something similar. That is a gnome shell extension that provides tiling window management. It's focus is keyboard driven window navigation and has the option to switch between tiling and floating mode.

https://github.com/pop-os/shell

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