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

121–130 of 187 posts

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

#121

Post by [deleted] »

jmchuster wrote: post #108
stormbrew wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So if everything is visible or not, then isn't the cognitive load now on keeping track of all the windows that aren't visible? How do you handle "secondary" windows, so like something you don't need right now, but will in a bit, or you're checking in on it or using it from time to time. So then overlapping windows serves the requirements of: - constant visual reminder of which secondary windows you have - but occupyi…

[deleted]

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

#122

Post by deadbunny »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #115
stormbrew wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't see the cognitive load you are talking about. It's just windows. You put roughly where you want them when you need them to have what you want visible. They stack. If one is out of your sight and you need it, you use the list or expose to find it and move it where it will be useful. It's like manipulating documents in the physical world except it's always easy to find a window in your stack of windows. It's a…

I can't speak for everyone and I'm a multiscreen type, but for me I have things on specific workspaces.

Workspace 1-4 Primary monitor (center, ultrawide, landscape)

Workspace 5-7 Second Monitor (left, portrait)

Workspace 8-10 Third Monitor (right, landscape)

1. Browser and terminals/vim for current project (ultrawide monitor = 4:3ish split)

2. As above if I need to switch to another project

3. As above if I need to switch to another project

4. Spare/"Personal" slacking off things like HN

5. Comms Slack/IRC etc...

6. Spare/Displaying things that work will in portrait like reading PDFs

7. Spare/Monitoring specific things to do with what I'm working on

8. Spare/Background noise videos

9. Music player

10. Email/Calendar

For me I usually sit with 5, 1, 10 visible across the 3 monitors 95% of the time which means I can see everything I immediately need. However if on a single monitor device the workspaces have the same use (mostly, 1 might get split into 1 = Terminals, 2 = Browser because it's a bit cramped on 16:9).

This means If I need my emails I hit Mod+0 which then focusses my email/calendar whether it's visible on my 3rd monitor or hidden on a single monitor setup. Or Mod+5 and I get Slack.

Once it's in your muscle memory you don't even think about it. The way I see it is it's like vim, once you have the shortcuts in your muscle memory you don't even think about where things are, they just appear when you need them.

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

#123

Post by onnyyonn »

rrix2 wrote: post #16

Khronkite is another "honorable mention" for KWin tiling and I prefer it over the one mentioned in TFA: https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite With KDE+X11 it's trivially easy to change the window manager away from KWin and still get the benefits of suspend/resume, multi-monitor auto-configuration, wifi, system tray, etc, by just setting the KDEWM environment variable in your profile. https://userbase.kde.org/Tutorials/…

You may want to have a look at Bismuth https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth . It's the successor to Khronkite.

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

#124

Post by Saint_Genet »

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…

TBH, it feels like so many "hackerish" people spend so muck time dinking around with their environment they don't get much else done. I used to be that way too when I first started using Linux back in the 90s, but nowadays I mostly run with whatever the defaults are and concentrate on my work.

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

#125

Post by numbsafari »

On macOS, with no native tiling WM, I’ve been enjoying using VSCode in full screen as essentially just that while coding/debugging/etc.

Typically split into 3 vertical panes: nav, editors, terminals. I mostly just use one big editor pane, but sometimes further split one way or the other depending on what I’m doing. Same for terminal sessions, though more frequently using some kind of watcher in a lower split.

Anyhow, it works pretty nice.

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

#126

Post by salamandersauce »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #115
stormbrew wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't see the cognitive load you are talking about. It's just windows. You put roughly where you want them when you need them to have what you want visible. They stack. If one is out of your sight and you need it, you use the list or expose to find it and move it where it will be useful. It's like manipulating documents in the physical world except it's always easy to find a window in your stack of windows. It's a…

You don't need to constantly think about exactly what you need to see. Nor do I need to fiddle with arrangements. There's less fiddling. With the WM I use every window is available in every frame and I can just cycle through them. I don't need to remember what a window is called or distinguish between 5 nearly identical thumbnails because I'm cycling through the windows at full size instead of looking at list or expose. I don't need to think about what monitor some window is on or what virtual desktop and there's never any visible clutter or noise because anything that's not something I want to look at is just not visible.

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

#127

Post by Macha »

dagw wrote: post #92
cycomanic wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused, you make it sound like there is something unique to OSX here. But every Linux WM has had virtual desktops since ages ago and virtual desktops are a superior solution to just fullscreen windows (they can do the same for fullscreen windows+do the same for groups of windows... )

OS X also has normal virtual desktops. The 'unique' feature of OS X is that when you maximize a window instead of maximizing on your current desktop, covering any other windows you have open, it creates a new virtual desktop and moves the maximized window there. When you de-maximize it automatically moves the window back to its original virtual desktop and removes the temporary desktop you created.

I've always found this behavior of OS X super confusing as it means full screening a window breaks my mental model of workspace arrangement when I use the workspace left/right commands. I much prefer i3's behaviour of full screen just being a state on the window you can toggle.

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

#128

Post by Macha »

qwertox wrote: post #80
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…

My issue is mostly with the half-screen vertical split (two side by side panes). Half a monitor is not enough for me to feel comfortable in an editor, so I'd split it 2/3 or even 3/4, but the remaining 1/3 or 1/4 are not wide enough to hold let's say terminals, and using a horizontal split to get the full width for terminals also steals a lot of height from the editor, while full width in terminals is usually not des…

I certainly have this problem with 1080p (or 4k at 2x, which is similar in screen area to content ratio at the same monitor size). But for me I don't have the same problem at 1440p (and I guess if I had one, 5k at 2x).

When I was younger I used to turn the font size way down to make two across work in 900p, but these days I stick to more comfortable font sizes.

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

#129

Post by Macha »

JNRowe wrote: post #39
christophilus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m the same. Neovim fills the center of my screen. The web application I’m working on sits behind it, with enough exposed that I can see if my changes are working / breaking, and with another terminal partially revealed showing any build errors. Works well for me. I never liked the layout that WMs picked, because they always force me to look to one side or the other (on a 4K and 5k monitor). Maybe if I was solely ru…

Many tiling WMs support this type of layout; magnifier in awesomewm, centeredmaster in dwm, etc. The difference compared to manually performing the task being that you can cycle the arrangement through various states without extra effort or losing the previous configuration. Of course, you can also just choose to float individual windows across background tiles in practically all tiling window managers too. I guess i…

It's not built in, but you could configure such a layout in i3 too (and I guess sway, since it's intended to be a clone?): https://i3wm.org/docs/layout-saving.html

Bit of first time setup but then you can just bind it to a hotkey after that.

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

#130

Post by mkesper »

qwertox wrote: post #80
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…

My issue is mostly with the half-screen vertical split (two side by side panes). Half a monitor is not enough for me to feel comfortable in an editor, so I'd split it 2/3 or even 3/4, but the remaining 1/3 or 1/4 are not wide enough to hold let's say terminals, and using a horizontal split to get the full width for terminals also steals a lot of height from the editor, while full width in terminals is usually not des…

You need a bigger monitor with higher resolution. Found that much easier than any two monitor setup or even monitor and laptop display.
Post reply on HN