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KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

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

#171
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah well. Stealing focus is happening more and more in macOS. A great annoyance…

Indeed. I switched from macOS to Windows about a year ago now and I have to say I really appreciate how on Windows stealing focus is much, much more rare than it was on macOS. I honestly found it infuriating on my Mac.

I know right? Especially when you've just booted up and half your apps are still realising they've just been opened and screaming for attention. They should just open in the background and only appear when I look for them. I don't understand why they haven't tackled that in 18 macOS versions. Simply launching an app with a flag saying "this is not a user-initiated launch but a reopen, stay back" would fix it.

At least bootup is a lot quicker on the latest M1s (privately I use KDE now but for work iIm still on Mac)

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

#172
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…

That's because you're first overlapping windows experience was Windows for sure.

With virtual desktops you just have 2 opened windows at most per workspace.

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

#173
post #92

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 actually hate this with a passion. Because it breaks the order of my virtual desktops, the new temporary one gets inserted after the one you maximised the application from. So the order gets completely messed up after that.

I love using many virtual desktops so YMMV.

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

#174
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So that's why maximize behaves so weirdly on Mac! I find it pretty jarring so I only use maximize now for some meetings and presentations if I have to use Mac.

Yeah and even before they did this, maximise behaved weirdly on a Mac. It didn't maximise to the screen but to the "content" which meant that some apps would not maximise fully.

You can still initiate the old behaviour by holding option when you click the green dot, by the way.

But macOS (at least since macOS X) has never had a maximise in the way that most other desktop environments have it. To simply make a window occupy the whole screen on top of everything else.

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

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’ve been the same. I came from MacOS into Linux in the last couple of years, but gave Pop_os! a try early on with its tiling wm. I found myself constantly planning layouts and positioning things. Nothing ever ended up feeling right, and it was exhausting. “I’ll have my browser window take the full height and half the width over here. Then I’ll put my code editor over on the right, half high, then my Terminal below i…

Psst. Try PaperWM. It allows quick resizing and tiling.

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

#176
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My experience with those was that they’d crunch the window down to a small rectangle which was hardly useful. I like having the browser and terminal be a reasonable size, even if hidden. Especially the browser; as I’m rarely testing mobile layouts when making changes.

The sizes are configurable, for example by setting mwfact in awesomewm via the config or dynamically with keys.

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

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Yeah I do the same with virtual desktops, except I right now have only one screen. Because I hate the way KDE switches virtual desktops for all screens together, I would really want each screen to have its own separate virtual desktop. I have 9 of them and mapped my numpad to the virtual desktop because I don't like combo keys very much. And I don't normally use the numpad for anything anyway :P How did you manage th…

Ah yes, forgot that bit. You're correct I use i3.

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

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sway supports both tiling and floating windows and you can define the rules and defaults as you wish. For example a browser window tiled with an editor and a media player floating on top. You could have one virtual desktop that defaults to tiling and another to floating. With a keyboard shortcut you can toggle a window between the two states. I was aware of tiling window managers for a decade before I switched from G…

As someone who switched from KDE in ~2017 mainly to try wayland, and stayed for the configurability and tiling aspect... Is there a way to make KDE ingest my sway configuration? I would get the best of both worlds this way. Bonus points if the resulting config is compatible with both! I'm pretty sure kwin's window rules support everything you can express in a sway configuration.

> I'm pretty sure kwin's window rules support everything you can express in a sway configuration

That seems very unlikely

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

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Keep in mind that to some degree workflows are inevitably a matter of taste and familiarity. That is we adjust over time to a certain way of working changing how we work to be in line with out our tools work and enjoy things whose workings are in line with our own mental models. I think you may have misunderstood how one works with a tiling wm rather than fiddling with the arrangement constantly one hardly does at al…

I pretty much never use virtual desktops. I never got the point. I want my windows to always be available not be hidden somewhere else. They stack perfectly fine and now that starting things is nearly instant I just close the applications I’m not currently using (I still have between ten and twenty windows open but that’s perfectly manageable with one desktop). I can get wanting windows side by side however but most descent floating windows managers have that nowadays.

Well, I guess it’s another thing I will never understand with people having trouble managing their hundreds of open tabs. It’s fascinating to me how people actually have very different way to use their tools and how it much shape the feelings they have towards them.

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

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only person left who still uses Expose? I feel like Apple is going to kill it off, they already rolled it into "Mission Control" and removed all the keybindings.

I use it and love it. I use three finger swipe up and hadn't ever looked for a keyboard shortcut. It seems to be set to ctrl-uparrow in the 'Mission Control' settings page. Or am I confused about terminology here?

There’s mission control which shows all the windows of every app and then there’s expose which shows all the windows of the current app.
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