Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

changelog.complete.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 187 posts

Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

#61

Post by spockz »

djur wrote: post #54
pjerem wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fellow maximiser here. It’s probably the reason why I still love OSX after all the shitty updates. The full-screen mode is a marvel of ergonomics once you get it. Just maximize your apps and switch between them with the trackpad like they are virtual desktops (because they, in fact, are). It’s an awesome mode for a single screen workflow. Tilings WM are cool but you are rapidly limited with be screen (and even with t…

My main gripe with the macOS fullscreen mode is that there's no way to force the non-fullscreen desktop to stay in one place. If something in a fullscreen app pulls up the desktop (for instance, running an installer you just downloaded), the desktop gets moved to the next position. I want to force it to stay in one place (or, ideally, have a gesture or hotkey to switch between my fullscreen windows and the desktop).…

And in addition hotkeys to go to a specific desktop/app!

Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

#62

Post by YaBomm »

anyfoo wrote: post #5

I must be one of the very few "hackerish" minded people that does not really get the appeal of tiling window managers. Even in the early days of Linux I meticulously arranged my overlapping windows in my X11R5 window manager. For example, there are some terminal windows or similar with running logs (or chats) at some of the edges, partially obscured by other windows who make better use of the space they cover. But th…

No post body was provided.

Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

#63

Post by tannhaeuser »

unsungNovelty wrote: post #38

The biggest productivity boost for me happened after I started using a Tiling WM (i3). I started out of necessity when I felt I have reached the maximum optimization with XFCE DE. I just didn't want to organize my windows manually again. Now browsers are all in 1st workspace. Text editors are all in 2nd. 4th is for chat apps. 6th for reading and documents like excel, pdf etc, 8 for image editing like GIMP, KRITA, Ink…

Not using a tiling WM, but especially on small notebooks I'm so desperate for compact decorations and a global Mac-like menu that I've even prolonged life of my old XPS 13 w/ Ubuntu 16.04 using Ubuntu Advantage/extended security maintenance (their old gnome2-based desktop with Unity). At least there's some hope using KDE Plasma eg. [1].

[1]: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/plasma-look-like-ubuntu-...

Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

#64

Post by gordaco »

zamalek wrote: post #12
anyfoo wrote: post #5

I must be one of the very few "hackerish" minded people that does not really get the appeal of tiling window managers. Even in the early days of Linux I meticulously arranged my overlapping windows in my X11R5 window manager. For example, there are some terminal windows or similar with running logs (or chats) at some of the edges, partially obscured by other windows who make better use of the space they cover. But th…

I think it's purely based on you workflow. I'm a "maximizer," 99% of the time things are maximized on my desktop. A second tile (browser) is usually extremely temporary. Other stuff goes to other desktops. So I general, my layout is highly consistent: just one tile. For what it's worth, hiding the unimportant details in a web page can also be accomplished by zoom/scroll - but that's definitely not to say your approac…

Same here. I'm usually a "single task" person (I like to focus. I know well that I don't function well when trying to do many things at once), so a single maximised window is always the optimal approach for me. This is also why I've never bothered with multiple displays, which most of my workmates love.

On the rare occasion when I need to use data from a window to write something on other (like something that can't be copied and pasted, or cases where I need to extract information but not literally copying, such as using some data points from a reference file in code I'm writing) I just use win+left and win+right to spliut the screen between the two windows (I assume that OSes other than Windows have similar hotkeys).

Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

#65

Post by dotancohen »

whalesalad wrote: post #8
xiaomai wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the same way. I've tried the various tiling WMs over the years. To me the ideal is just letting me manage the windows myself, and then if you give me some keybindings to snap a window into a certain half or quadrant of the screen then life is real good.

This is all I need. I use an app on macOS called sizeup that let's me do this. I can center a window for reading text on my larger display. Fullscreen a window without using the actual native full screen on macOS. Snap left, snap right, up down etc. It can also keep track of hardware profiles, so windows will restore to their bigger sizes and positions when I plug my laptop into a display. https://s3.whalesalad.com/i…

Just so you know, KDE does all this natively.

Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

#66

Post by Joeri »

stormbrew wrote: post #50
anyfoo wrote: post #5

I must be one of the very few "hackerish" minded people that does not really get the appeal of tiling window managers. Even in the early days of Linux I meticulously arranged my overlapping windows in my X11R5 window manager. For example, there are some terminal windows or similar with running logs (or chats) at some of the edges, partially obscured by other windows who make better use of the space they cover. But th…

Everything you're describing in this reply just exhausts the hell out of my brain. You're describing an incredibly large amount of cognitive load you hold in your head all the time about where things are and what they mean and how much of them are visible. Tiling WM are largely about just not thinking that much about windows at all. They're visible or they're not, they occupy precise areas on your screen, and moving…

Your comment and the comment it is a reply to remind me of the post-show part of the classic ATP episode “The Windows of Siracusa County” where John Siracusa explains his approach to windowing, to the absolute dismay of his cohosts because of the seemingly insane amount of complexity.

https://atp.fm/96 (at 1:29:30)

Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

#67

Post by maccam94 »

I just upgraded to a big 4K monitor and I'm trying to figure out my options for migrating from GNOME+Wayland on Ubuntu 22.04. It seems like there's sway (i3 ported to Wayland) along with some sort of sway-GNOME session config that looks like a WIP. Or there's a GNOME extension called ShellTile but it needs to be ported to GTK4. Does anyone else have recommendations for a GNOME-ish tiling setup under Wayland?

Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

#68

Post by lostmsu »

anyfoo wrote: post #5

I must be one of the very few "hackerish" minded people that does not really get the appeal of tiling window managers. Even in the early days of Linux I meticulously arranged my overlapping windows in my X11R5 window manager. For example, there are some terminal windows or similar with running logs (or chats) at some of the edges, partially obscured by other windows who make better use of the space they cover. But th…

Disclaimer: I am the author.

For Windows 10+ I made Stack WM: https://losttech.software/stack.html

I works differently from i3: you predefine screen zones (possibly overlapping), and then just move your windows between them with keyboard shortcuts or middle mouse button.

IMHO, covers the problems you mentioned. You can have:

- multiple windows in one zone with normal Z ordering

- an improvised taskbar for any zone or a group of zones

- zones that stack windows vertically or horizontally or tile them in a fixed grid

- zones that dynamically adjust size depending on contents

- windows of certain app opening directly into a certain zone

- floating windows

- widgets (the easiest one is simply showing text from a URL with XQuery or JSON parser)

- customize the hell out of it with WPF

It is now one of a few things holding me back on Windows: until I have it or something else very similar running on Linux, I have no replacement to manage my 3 screens the way I like it.

Post reply on HN