bspwm: tiling window manager that represents windows as leaves of a binary tree
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Re: bspwm: tiling window manager that represents windows as leaves of a binary tree
#2I’m curious: after about four things the windows seem to start getting really small. Does anyone really find much use in a window manager that can subdivide infinitely?
Re: bspwm: tiling window manager that represents windows as leaves of a binary tree
#3A great aspect of bspwm is that it is relatively unopinionated about how it is configured and controlled. You can easily invoke bspc from any language of your choosing. No need to be limited by an inexpressive configuration file. No need to write the configuration in one specific language that the developer favoured.
Another feature I appreciate is that it does not bind any keys. It is left up to the user to implement. I get to choose which keys are used, and what they do. I wish all programs I used allowed me to configure their key bindings like this.
bspwm is less of a window manager in the traditional sense, and more of a tool that can be used to build your own window manager.
Re: bspwm: tiling window manager that represents windows as leaves of a binary tree
#4I’m curious: after about four things the windows seem to start getting really small. Does anyone really find much use in a window manager that can subdivide infinitely?
I use bspwm daily and the benefit is that you get a predictable behavior when you launch a new terminal or w/e, which is especially nice when you navigate almost entirely by keyboard; you know where the window will spawn.
Re: bspwm: tiling window manager that represents windows as leaves of a binary tree
#5I’m curious: after about four things the windows seem to start getting really small. Does anyone really find much use in a window manager that can subdivide infinitely?
1) You need to do something when many windows are open. Making windows small is predictable and lets the user position the windows "correctly".
Possible "correct" positions I can think of is: move a window to a different workspace (so not all are visible at the same time). Make a window floating (I often have a small terminal open that I shove into deadspace of another window).
2) It can serve as a selection pane. Half of the screen is devoted to the current window, While the other half (possibly sized to take up less than half the screen) is storing a bunch of windows to be swapped in for the current one.
Re: bspwm: tiling window manager that represents windows as leaves of a binary tree
#6Isn't this what XMonad also does with their Zipper?
Re: bspwm: tiling window manager that represents windows as leaves of a binary tree
#7Isn't this what XMonad also does with their Zipper?
In my experience XMonad typically can do anything any other tiling WM can do, but the high barrier of needing to know Haskell before being able to do the most basic of configuration keeps most people from finding that out.
Oh, and it wasn’t stable for me. That might be related to the prior comment, since I really don’t know Haskell at all.
Re: bspwm: tiling window manager that represents windows as leaves of a binary tree
#8Isn't this what XMonad also does with their Zipper?
Zipper is a bit more flexible due to not matching position in data structure with position on screen.
Thus it's really easy to have layouts like accordion or other partially overlapping tiles, or having one big window in middle and the rest in circles around, or just adding a bit of flex based on preserving proportions.
Re: bspwm: tiling window manager that represents windows as leaves of a binary tree
#9I stuck with bspwm due to the way config is handled. You just but bash commands in bspwmrc, which runs the bspc commands that does the actual configuration on start. bspwm+sxhkd+polybar is my prefered setup.
Re: bspwm: tiling window manager that represents windows as leaves of a binary tree
#10This is single handedly the greatest increaser of my productivity.