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Papersway – a scrollable window management for Sway/i3wm

spwhitton.name

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Re: Papersway – a scrollable window management for Sway/i3wm

#31

I do something similar with i3's built in horizontal tabs. A few terminals and a browser look like this: https://i.imgur.com/8vVNYno.png You can add or remove columns by moving a window past an edge: https://i.imgur.com/MlPR05b.png

Yeah, that's what I used to do, basically, before writing papersway. I was happy with it for many years.

Re: Papersway – a scrollable window management for Sway/i3wm

#33

It would be great to have some screenshots or video of how this works and what it looks like embedded on the landing page provided. :)

Check out the Karousel (KDE) link from the "related projects" comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41342596

It has a short clip, I assume it is similar enough to the actual submission to give an idea what it's about.

Re: Papersway – a scrollable window management for Sway/i3wm

#35
post #6

Related projects (from niri’s README): PaperWM (Gnome) https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM karousel (KDE) https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel niri (wayland) https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri hyprscroller (hyprland plugin) https://github.com/dawsers/hyprscroller hyprslidr (hyprland plugin) https://gitlab.com/magus/hyprslidr PaperWM.spoon (MacOS) https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon

I've become a really big fan of this model of window management after using Karousel on KDE for the last 3 months. This is especially useful if you're using a widescreen monitor. I never understood the appeal of tiling as 99% of the time I am focused on a single window at a time and I want it to take the full height of my display, so scrolling with the focused window centered is my ideal workflow. I only wish I had t…

Do you not often quickly look between files? If so, odds are you're using tiles within tmux, vim, emacs, vscode, or something.

I use kakoune, which has a client/server architecture. Each kak instance I open within a project connects to the same server, so it is natural for me to use my WM (niri) to tile my terminals, instead of having something like tmux or the editor do the tiling for me. I don't want to bother with more than one layer of WM, where separate layers don't mix.

Re: Papersway – a scrollable window management for Sway/i3wm

#36
post #6

Related projects (from niri’s README): PaperWM (Gnome) https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM karousel (KDE) https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel niri (wayland) https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri hyprscroller (hyprland plugin) https://github.com/dawsers/hyprscroller hyprslidr (hyprland plugin) https://gitlab.com/magus/hyprslidr PaperWM.spoon (MacOS) https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon

I've become a really big fan of this model of window management after using Karousel on KDE for the last 3 months. This is especially useful if you're using a widescreen monitor. I never understood the appeal of tiling as 99% of the time I am focused on a single window at a time and I want it to take the full height of my display, so scrolling with the focused window centered is my ideal workflow. I only wish I had t…

> I never understood the appeal of tiling as 99% of the time I am focused on a single window at a time and I want it to take the full height of my display

Even if everything is full screen, it enforces that I don't have something else hidden behind, gives me the ability to snap immediately between them (programs/workspaces) with a keyboard shortcut.

I mostly only have 1 full screen program per workspace (sway on Linux, yabai on macOS) but find that invaluable, really struggle to use say my wife's laptop with an overlapping mess of windows, where the best I can is tab between them. The main exception, where I do have them actually tile, is terminals - I don't need the full width anyway, so my workspace 1 is always 2-3 alacritty instances. Everything else that's always open is full screen in its own workspace.

Re: Papersway – a scrollable window management for Sway/i3wm

#38
post #6

Related projects (from niri’s README): PaperWM (Gnome) https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM karousel (KDE) https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel niri (wayland) https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri hyprscroller (hyprland plugin) https://github.com/dawsers/hyprscroller hyprslidr (hyprland plugin) https://gitlab.com/magus/hyprslidr PaperWM.spoon (MacOS) https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon

I've become a really big fan of this model of window management after using Karousel on KDE for the last 3 months. This is especially useful if you're using a widescreen monitor. I never understood the appeal of tiling as 99% of the time I am focused on a single window at a time and I want it to take the full height of my display, so scrolling with the focused window centered is my ideal workflow. I only wish I had t…

>I never understood the appeal of tiling

I like physical positional cues, and being able to just flick my eyes over to other things to check status rather than having to scroll through hidden context. I have a terrible habit of losing my train of thought if I check on something that's hidden, and thereby hide my current work. So just being able to glance and then glance back is a huge plus.

I also have an insane amount of screen real estate on my work machine (2x 4K 30" displays, 1x 2K 15"), so I can have everything on screen at once. I mostly use terminals, a couple browsers, and slack, so YMMV if you are using a bunch of IDE-like windows or the like.

Re: Papersway – a scrollable window management for Sway/i3wm

#39
post #6

Related projects (from niri’s README): PaperWM (Gnome) https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM karousel (KDE) https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel niri (wayland) https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri hyprscroller (hyprland plugin) https://github.com/dawsers/hyprscroller hyprslidr (hyprland plugin) https://gitlab.com/magus/hyprslidr PaperWM.spoon (MacOS) https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon

Related projects[1]:

Spacial Shell (i3/Sway, OCaml) https://github.com/lthms/spatial-shell

Newm (Wayland, vry fancy) https://sr.ht/~atha/newm-atha/

Video of newm https://youtu.be/z7S3L-RZskY

Obsolete (but fascinating):

CardboardWM (https://gitlab.com/cardboardwm/cardboard)

EndlessWM (Wayland) https://github.com/peterfajdiga/EndlessWM

1: From https://lobste.rs/s/urwcat/spatial_shell_6th_release_might_b...

Re: Papersway – a scrollable window management for Sway/i3wm

#40
post #9

Window management has been stagnant so long. I have mixed feelings about the Paper paradigm, but it's heartening to see some work in the space experimenting with the bedrock UX for operating systems, and hope we can eventually move past the floating windows approach on desktop and clumsy swipe-between-apps approach on mobile.

Agreed. All I want is to manage OS windows the same way I manage Vim windows where the content and the container are decoupled. Surprised nobody has made this yet.

I think Emacs works the same with frame/buffers. What I really like in Emacs is not having "tabs" or anything like that. I can always open any file on the filesystem, why do I care what it is open currently? Only at the moment I want to switch do I want to see a list, but I don't want to select it like some neanderthal, I want to narrow it down by typing.

I wonder how well this would work for a WM, though. Processes are a lot heavier than buffers so it kind of does matter how many are running. Unless it's a system like Android where any app expects to be oom killed at any time.

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