Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

61–70 of 97 posts

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

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 understa…

The point why i3 / sway on Linux are used so much is not that they have a specific layouting concept. It's because they let the user decide what layout and how many virtual desktops they need. I usually have 10+ virtual desktops, because I use 3 screens, and each of them has a different set of virtual desktops - which are also not bound to a specific screen and can be moved to another screen just as easily. If I need…

> On MacOS and Windows [...] the virtual desktops there are usually just a single stack behind the scenes, and they are not per screen

I'm not using a mac anymore, but last time I checked, this wasn't true. You could have per-screen virtual desktops, meaning you could have screen 1's virtual desktop stay put while you switch desktops on screen 2. The setting was easily accessible, too. In Settings -> Mission Control IIRC.

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

#62
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the REST of Linux really sucks for laptops, with all the hardware-specific tweaks needed Just to state the obvious, "hardware-specific tweaks" are hardware-specific. It is not hard, these days, to buy hardware where everything just works out of the box. It doesn't make sense to say that in general Linux sucks for laptops when what you're complaining about is a problem caused by your hardware.

What's pretty surrealistic in this discussion is that MacOS in comparison cannot even run on all that hardware. And Windows won't either because driver support ended a long time ago when you use old hardware. Of course Linux sucks, but it only does so because it has the issue of trying to run anywhere with no default settings enforced, because those would fail anyways.

> And Windows won't either because driver support ended a long time ago when you use old hardware.

Or new hardware. I have an EliteBook 845 G8 (Zen 3) from December 2021. Windows doesn't recognize its webcam. Some issue with some USB chip along the way. No, HP's provided drivers don't help. Yes, HP recommends Windows 11.

I have its cousin, an EliteBook 840 G8 (Intel 11th gen), same vintage. Windows doesn't recognize its touchpad / trackpoint during install. It needs specific drivers from Windows Update. Luckily, the internal keyboard and an external USB mouse work fine.

I've even tried with the latest win 11 22h2, that's been recently released, no luck. On the webcam front, it actually works at first, then it figures it requires some "updates" which break things again.

Linux has worked perfectly from the beginning on both of them, no random tweaks required. And I'm not even running Ubuntu or similar, which you'd expect to do things automagically, just plain Arch.

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

#63
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've tried Regolith at one point (mid-2020) out of curiosity, and the experience was miserable. For some reason, everything was extremely laggy. It was on an older PC (i5-6500) so I figured the integrated GPU was too slow. Of course, my even older (2013) macbook pro worked absolutely fine with macOs's effects, but still. I was down to the point of trying to order a dedicated GPU that would fit the small form-factor case while being fanless.

Then I tried Arch with i3 and the slowness went away. It would even happily render blur effects via picom without any issue.

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

#64
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

How do you do that?

I've noticed animations seem to be quicker in the win11 22h2 update, which makes them much less annoying, but I still prefer the instant change of i3.

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

#66
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

Just looked up the meaning of the word. It is absolutely exquisite!

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

#67
Somewhat related: If you like hotkey-driven window tiling and positioning tools like macOS Spectre/Rectangle apps, I wrote https://github.com/ahmetb/RectangleWin for Windows a while back and mostly have been personally using it to position windows to 1/2, 1/3, or 2/3 of edges/corners of the display.

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

#68

Very nice although I feel perfectly happy with MS FancyZones.

Been using FancyZones since the first version and as of late, I find that while basic features are great productivity boons, you still have to manage the windows and layouts manually. FancyZones needs an API to automate with, for example to switch layout when a specific window appears. Should not be too hard to add, just a bunch of command line arguments to call from AHK.

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

#69
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…

It is surprising to me that this and some of the subsequent comments view the state of tiling WMs on Mac unfavourably. I run i3gaps on my personal GNU/Linux machine and yabai with skhd at work, and both work equally fine in my experience (of course, it may as well be that my workflow does not rely on some critical piece of functionality that is not available for yabai).

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

#70
post #9

Just to add one more to the conversation: I have found "FancyWM" to be a real productivity booster. For some reason it is pretty unknown, though.

FancyWM is my go-to window manager for Windows. I have look at komorebi before, but it look very complicated to set up.
Post reply on HN