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Show HN: Komorebi – A tiling window manager for Windows 10/11 written in Rust

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Re: Show HN: Komorebi – A tiling window manager for Windows 10/11 written in Rust

#31

Post by bsnnkv »

ChrisClark wrote: post #22

Does it always just split the most recently opened window? Do you have to open them in a specific order to get the sizes you want? Browser first, terminal third, etc?

There are multiple different default layouts and you can even define your own custom layouts[1] and set rules on when to activate them[2].

In any layout, you can always use the `komorebic.exe move ` command to place a window in the desired tile to achieve the desired size.

[1] https://lgug2z.github.io/komorebi-custom-layout-generator/

[2] https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi/#dynamically-changing-lay...

Re: Show HN: Komorebi – A tiling window manager for Windows 10/11 written in Rust

#32

Post by j1elo »

Offtopic but beautiful: komorebi is my favorite word in the category of "complex things in my language, for which other languages have a succint word", and in japanese it means the beams formed by light and shadows when sunlight shines through tree leaves

Re: Show HN: Komorebi – A tiling window manager for Windows 10/11 written in Rust

#34

Post by bsnnkv »

j1elo wrote: post #32

Offtopic but beautiful: komorebi is my favorite word in the category of "complex things in my language, for which other languages have a succint word", and in japanese it means the beams formed by light and shadows when sunlight shines through tree leaves

My wife chose the name for the project, she is such a beautiful soul.

Re: Show HN: Komorebi – A tiling window manager for Windows 10/11 written in Rust

#35

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

I really like qtile under Linux. I don’t use windows regularly but would highly encourage an abstraction layer such that others can implement their own manager using your tiling abstraction layer. It sounds crazy but the ability to extend a wm is something a small set of users will use, but will be a great value to those users.

Re: Show HN: Komorebi – A tiling window manager for Windows 10/11 written in Rust

#36

Post by eyelidlessness »

extr wrote: post #4

Komorebi works pretty well. In the end, I felt like it's limitations were mostly at the OS level rather than the fault of the software itself (similar to tiling WM on MacOs). I think for such a thing to really work, virtual desktops need to be a first class feature of the desktop environment. For Windows/Mac, they're still kind of janky. Whereas on Linux, I can bind Win+Tab to "Previous Desktop", hold down the button…

I haven’t used a Linux desktop environment for many years now, so maybe there’s some nuance I’m not understanding, but virtual desktops have been a first class part of the macOS UI for many years. Swiping between them is only delayed by the default animation speed of that aspect of the window manager, and generally meant to match trackpad gestures and provide inertia consistent with other gestures.

Trying to understand how this relates to a tiling WM, I’m wondering if the virtual desktop in dedicated tiling WMs concept goes beyond multiple instances of the display and has arbitrary widths (or single dimension spaces)? That does sound nice for some ways I’d want a tiling WM, but it’s not what I’ve previously thought I’d want in one where I might have a grid with non-uniform x/y divisions.

Like it sounds very confusing to have a layout such as:

  a a b b c
  a a b b c
  a a d d e
And to treat anything besides `a` as a “desktop” even if they’re variable width.

Re: Show HN: Komorebi – A tiling window manager for Windows 10/11 written in Rust

#37

Post by least »

chaorace wrote: post #27
least wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only fairly recently has Linux really seen much development of tiling WMs on top of things like Gnome and KDE. I know some of them can be run on top of XFCE and have for a while, but all of them fell similarly janky to ones on MacOS. It's only once you adopt something like i3, dwm, awesome, bspwm, xmonad, etc. that you get something that works as you'd hope in terms of spaces and tiling behavior. The problem is that…

You've inadvertently described the delineation between a DE and WM. WMs manage windows and that's it -- they're lacking by design. A DE (e.g. Gnome, KDE) is a multi-part package that bundles up a given WM with the software suite necessary for running a conventional desktop. There exist plenty of DEs that bundle up tiling WMs for convenient use (for example: Regolith[1]) [1]: https://regolith-desktop.com/

I've tried Regolith but at the time I believe it was just a ubuntu fork and you couldn't install it as a standalone package. It seems that has changed now which might warrant looking at.

> You've inadvertently described the delineation between a DE and WM.

My problem is that the competently done DEs tend to have their own WM and are not designed to allow you to run a different WM on top of it. I understand that most tiling WMs expect that the user might also want to set up their own desktop picture service, notifications, status bars, etc. I just think that there should be one that ships with something sensible that it doesn't just feel like it's piping STDOUT to an html file overlayed on top of the desktop that you then have to create custom scripts to have reasonable functionality. Polybar comes to mind as one such example.

It just feels like the tradeoffs are so massive and I simply don't have the skill to create something that matches my own wants for a linux desktop. I love tinkering but I don't want to have to tinker with everything to get a solution that works for me.

Re: Show HN: Komorebi – A tiling window manager for Windows 10/11 written in Rust

#38

Post by least »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #18
least wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only fairly recently has Linux really seen much development of tiling WMs on top of things like Gnome and KDE. I know some of them can be run on top of XFCE and have for a while, but all of them fell similarly janky to ones on MacOS. It's only once you adopt something like i3, dwm, awesome, bspwm, xmonad, etc. that you get something that works as you'd hope in terms of spaces and tiling behavior. The problem is that…

Generally agree, and https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/index.html is the best thing I've found for MacOS. Snap is pretty good now on Windows 11 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/snap-your-window... but AquaSnap can still do more. https://github.com/glsorre/amethystwindows looks decent and more minimal but I haven't tried it.

There's no shortage of window management apps on MacOS, though I think the limitations of the API make it hard for them to be anywhere near as fluid and snappy as Linux's tiling WMs. Amethyst and Yabai are the two automatic tiling WMs I'm aware of on MacOS, along with a hammerspoon tiling wm that I can't recall the name of. Magnet, Moom, BetterTouchTool (and BetterSnapTool), Rectangle, and countless others are all quite good if you want to manually move windows around.

A lot of it just unreliable for reasons I can't discern. I have keybindings in my hammerspoon config to switch between applications based on their position on screen relative to the active window, but sometimes it just doesn't work and even when it does it's quite slow. It feels like it should not only work but should be extremely fast given that MacOS knows exactly where every window is placed and its dimensions that can be accessed by hammerspoon, but unfortunately it's neither fast nor reliable.

I'm currently using a mix of hammerspoon and amethyst which is working okay but not great and everything is a bit slow. Changing spaces is slow, modestly improved by reduce motion settings. Yabai can get rid of the delay between switching spaces but only if you disable SIP.

Glad they exist and I'm glad that third party applications can interact with MacOS' window management, but I do wish some of it were snappier. Moving single windows is quite fast but anything more than that it feels sluggish.

Re: Show HN: Komorebi – A tiling window manager for Windows 10/11 written in Rust

#39

Post by naikrovek »

bsnnkv wrote: post #30
naikrovek wrote: post #28

it’s amazing what people will do to get the tiling stuff i’ve had via an AutoHotKey script for … feels like a decade, but i don’t know how long i’ve had it. I didn’t come up with it, but i collaborated a little. https://gist.github.com/naikrovek/b13a77d169de0e192bcf48fec0... it’s designed for a single high res monitor (1440p or better) and multiple monitors aren’t supported at all. i haven’t added that because i don’…

For me, one of the biggest motivations in writing komorebi was that I wanted to separate the window management from the key binding and shortcuts using a message-passing architecture similar to bspwm and yabai. By exposing all of the functionality (aka socket messages) via a cli (komorebic), I can use whatever I want to handle my shortcuts, which in turn makes it easy to configure my shortcuts to whatever I want. An…

that is indeed a good feature.

Re: Show HN: Komorebi – A tiling window manager for Windows 10/11 written in Rust

#40

Post by fjfbsufhdvfy »

orev wrote: post #12
extr wrote: post #4

Komorebi works pretty well. In the end, I felt like it's limitations were mostly at the OS level rather than the fault of the software itself (similar to tiling WM on MacOs). I think for such a thing to really work, virtual desktops need to be a first class feature of the desktop environment. For Windows/Mac, they're still kind of janky. Whereas on Linux, I can bind Win+Tab to "Previous Desktop", hold down the button…

In Windows 10 and 11, after you create another virtual desktop, you can easily move between them with built-in Win+Ctrl+Left/Right Arrow. It may not be as perfectly tuned as many would like, but it works well enough.

You can disable the switch animation, which makes it much nicer to use. Just instantly changes the content on all your monitors then. It even works with fullscreen applications on different desktops...
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