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Moving Back to a Tiling WM – XMonad

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Re: Moving Back to a Tiling WM – XMonad

#51

Post by qudat »

Philpax wrote: post #43
rootnod3 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from the Haskell fun, xmonad is really really good. Especially how it handles workspaces on multiple monitors. By default, each monitor has one workspace. Not one workspace for ALL monitors. So if your side screen has say documentation open, and you switch on your main screen from terminal to editor, only the main screen changes. The side screen stays untouched. Some people prefer it, some hate it. But it's goo…

I'm not a Niri stan by any means - I only switched to it the other week, and was using sway/i3 before then - but I suspect that most alternatives have answers to these, too. > Especially how it handles workspaces on multiple monitors. By default, each monitor has one workspace. Not one workspace for ALL monitors. I'm pretty sure this is the case for most tiling WMs; it's definitely the case for Niri ( https://github.…

To pile on, if I wanted an actual language to do config work I would prefer bash for simple scripting. I started using riverwm and I love its take on config. Use whatever language you want because configuring it is just running a sequence of riverctl commands. I found it very ergonomic since i can test config in the cli, I can just use a bash script to run commands — and some extra daemons like mako, waybar, and wlsunset

Re: Moving Back to a Tiling WM – XMonad

#52

Post by BeetleB »

SoftTalker wrote: post #49
BeetleB wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is opposed to a traditional tiling WM where you'd either need to open the app in another workspace, use some stacking feature or worst of all shove the new window into the current view by resizing some other window(s) which is often not ideal. I use Awesome Window Manager and one feature I like about it is this: Say I've got my terminal in workspace 1, Firefox in workspace 2, and Emacs in workspace 3. There ar…

I know how to send a window to another workspace but not how to combine two entire workspaces. Is that a default keystroke or something you set up?

https://awesomewm.org/doc/manpages/awesome.1.html

     Mod4 + Control + 1-9
        Toggle tag view.
It's a bit arcane written that way, but each workspace is a tag. Pressing Mod4 + Control + 2 means to show workspace 2. The effect is cumulative. If you now press Mod4 + Control + 3, it will be showing both workspace 2 and 3 simultaneously (and tiling the combined set of windows).

If you press Mod4 + Control + 3 again, it will remove workspace 3 from view.

If you now just leave to go to some workspace, (e.g. Mod4 + 5), it will only show workspace 5.

Can't live without it.

Re: Moving Back to a Tiling WM – XMonad

#53

Post by cout »

WD-42 wrote: post #19
SubiculumCode wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when you say tiling support, do you mean automatic tiling, or sending it to a corner via key combo?

It's not even the tiling so much, but the ability to move directionally between windows using super+hjkl or whatever, that's the killer for me. The big DEs like KDE and GNOME can technically tile but you're still stuck with alt-tab to switch windows which is horrible.

That's why I wrote this: https://github.com/cout/windowfocus

I bind Alt+Shift+H to run "windowfocus left", which figures out which window is "to the left" based on some heuristics such as the direction between the center of the active window and the other windows on the screen. Since it works uses the center of the window, it works with overlapping windows (but intentionally excludes windows that are occluded).

I've used it in both xfce and kde (though not recently).

Re: Moving Back to a Tiling WM – XMonad

#54

Post by bryanlarsen »

cout wrote: post #53
WD-42 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even the tiling so much, but the ability to move directionally between windows using super+hjkl or whatever, that's the killer for me. The big DEs like KDE and GNOME can technically tile but you're still stuck with alt-tab to switch windows which is horrible.

That's why I wrote this: https://github.com/cout/windowfocus I bind Alt+Shift+H to run "windowfocus left", which figures out which window is "to the left" based on some heuristics such as the direction between the center of the active window and the other windows on the screen. Since it works uses the center of the window, it works with overlapping windows (but intentionally excludes windows that are occluded). I've…

KDE's meta alt arrow doesn't exclude occluded windows, but if you're tiling you probably don't have those

Re: Moving Back to a Tiling WM – XMonad

#55

Post by smallerfish »

0x1ch wrote: post #46
smallerfish wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who wants to spend their weekends reading desktop environment docs? If that's your hobby, fine. I just want a working DE.

I believe it saves time, the documentation is available and easily digestible, and there's thousands of existing dotfiles to take from. I'd be disappointed to hear Claude couldn't do this. I'm mostly pointing out that the documentation is very easy to read and implement for most tiling WMs, without the need for a coding agent.

Who wants to read thousands of existing dotfiles?

But I'm primarily talking about the missing pieces that most tiling window managers have that you need to implement yourself, or the annoying bugs that are buried in github.

I need a lock screen; fine, hyperidle. How is it configured? Once it works it works.15 seconds with Claude or 2-3 minutes googling and implementing. Why the hell would you not use it?

QT apps have fuzzy fonts in Hyprland. Turns out that's because I was using 1.5 fractional scaling on my 4k monitor, which was information buried in some github that has barely any traffic, which Claude found while I was doing actual work.

The google meet PIP window strobes because who the hell knows why, but that too was solved by Claude finding the right github ticket and applying opacity 0.999 instead of 1.0 for that window specifically. Where is that documented in the hyprland manual?

The point is that tiling window managers _in my experience_ always have rough edges, and I've been dipping in and out of them for 20 years. Now that many people (I guess not including your good self) are using LLMs all day every day to move faster in producing code, you can apply the same tooling to bring the tiling environment up to the same level of quality that we're used to with the bigger DMs that have a lot more resources and eyes on them.

Re: Moving Back to a Tiling WM – XMonad

#56

Post by zem »

my favourite xmonad feature (that distinguished it from the other tiling WMs I've used) is the ability to have empty workspaces. that way I can maintain a persistent mapping of applications to workspaces, with muscle memory for the keybindings to switch to various apps. (also a nice trick I picked up from someone else's config file was to have a "scratch space" desktop with a key binding that either moved to it or moved back to the desktop I came from)

Re: Moving Back to a Tiling WM – XMonad

#57

Post by nagisa »

Philpax wrote: post #12

Configuring your WM in Haskell seems fun, but I suspect "fun" is the primary motivator, not any kind of practical reason. Type-checking keybindings is cute, but you're going to discover that the keybinding doesn't work when you go to use it, so how much time are you really saving? That's not helped by the fact that many WMs/compositors have validators for their configs, so you're getting much of the same benefit with…

Back when I had my own Xmonad config – during student years with too much time than I knew what to do with – the biggest benefit to Xmonad being a haskell program that I myself wrote was that it was a program that I myself wrote.

This meant that instead of e.g. spawning some utility on a media key input, the compositor could directly stay connected to the dbus and control mpdris clients directly.

The way I see xmonad in retrospective today is that it is/was a "make your own compositor" library much like wlroots, smithay, etc, but it came with enough of the batteries included in the package that spinning up a nice and productive environment took barely any code. Something you can't really do with wlroots or similar.

Re: Moving Back to a Tiling WM – XMonad

#58

Post by somat »

zem wrote: post #56

my favourite xmonad feature (that distinguished it from the other tiling WMs I've used) is the ability to have empty workspaces. that way I can maintain a persistent mapping of applications to workspaces, with muscle memory for the keybindings to switch to various apps. (also a nice trick I picked up from someone else's config file was to have a "scratch space" desktop with a key binding that either moved to it or mo…

If we are doing a survey I use spectrwm and it has empty/dedicated workspaces. It also has a concept of shared workspaces, windows there are present in all workspaces, used for fleshing out common desktop ui docks and the like. I have to admit that while I spent a couple of hours figuring it out one day, It turns out I prefer a really thin/bare desktop so don't use it.

Spectrwm is not well known, but it fits this sweet spot between super simple with few moving parts yet still configurable enough to work the way I want to. far simpler than xmonad or even I3 but with better defaults and more easily configurable than dwm.

Re: Moving Back to a Tiling WM – XMonad

#59

Post by zem »

somat wrote: post #58
zem wrote: post #56

my favourite xmonad feature (that distinguished it from the other tiling WMs I've used) is the ability to have empty workspaces. that way I can maintain a persistent mapping of applications to workspaces, with muscle memory for the keybindings to switch to various apps. (also a nice trick I picked up from someone else's config file was to have a "scratch space" desktop with a key binding that either moved to it or mo…

If we are doing a survey I use spectrwm and it has empty/dedicated workspaces. It also has a concept of shared workspaces, windows there are present in all workspaces, used for fleshing out common desktop ui docks and the like. I have to admit that while I spent a couple of hours figuring it out one day, It turns out I prefer a really thin/bare desktop so don't use it. Spectrwm is not well known, but it fits this swe…

does it integrate well with any desktop environment? that was the other killer feature of xmonad for me, it worked well with MATE and kde until the wayland switch. I ultimately switched to cosmic because of issues with the (wayland + DE + xmonad) stack, but I do miss the better tiling features of xmonad.
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