I’ve been using tiling WMs for some years now (mostly sway, but also tested cosmic a bit). I really love them: you theme workspaces and organize everything into them, and no window is ever hidden, which makes finding them trivial. But the cost of having every window displayed in that workspace is that they start getting way too small when you have a lot of them. This is usually not a big deal, since you can create tabs or just open new generic workspaces.
But what has been bugging me are windows that need to be big, otherwise they are unusable (like gimp, kdenlive, libreoffice, sometimes firefox). Tabbing them in fullscreen messes with the workspace layout, and if you dedicate an entire generic workspace for them, you surely will lose it.
That’s where scrollable WMs enter the scene. They respect window sizes at the cost of their visibility.
niri.gif
NGL, this is not a good idea. It’s easy to lose windows that are off-screen. But what if you only use it sometimes? Think of it as a regular tiling WM, but when you need it, it creates more space off-screen.
To achieve this, I’ve been using Niri with the tilemod script. It helps make Niri behave more like a regular tiling.
tilemod.gif
It’s been a good experience over the last week. My workflow is mostly unchanged, but when I need to work with a window in fullscreen, it’s always a relief that I’m using Niri.
Has anyone else here tried scrollables? I’m in this excitement phase so I want to read more about it (even from people who tried and didn’t like them) :)
Me also a tiling guy, and since a few years I switched to KDE and use an extension called Krohnkite to tile windows automatically. I personally don’t like the idea of endless scrollable desktops. To get a taste, I tried a scrollable window manager extension for KDE, just to see if the workflow would click with me. To me it doesn’t feel different from (classic) floating style of managing windows. Why? Because I have to scroll and search for the window.
This is precisely the same feeling I had when I first tested Niri. It only changed once I started treating it as a tiling that sometimes expands when needed.
I have to say, I would like to have a “layout” that expends like a scrollable type. I mean by layout the tiling logic (Quarter, Monacle, BTree and so on). I think there is a use case for having that, but I don’t want to lose the tiling worklow as it is right now. You know what, I got curious again and will try that extension again.
Edit: Sadly it was bugged for me. (Edit in Edit: Turns out Karousel extension does not support multi monitor.) Had to use the TTY (Ctrl+Alt+F2) to disable that Karousel extension. I remember when it worked, not sure what happened. Seems to dislike something about my current setup. I’m not ready to switch to an entire different window manager yet, but I’m also quiet happy anyway. Maybe its because I have two screens now, and it does not support multiple screens.
Ouch. Sorry about that :(
100% fair. I only changed because my last setup was annoying me
Hey, I just wanted report that the extension Karousel in KDE works only with single monitor. It was bugged because it does not support multi monitor, as I thought. I’m trying it out now and wanted mention this here in case someone wants to use it too. How do you deal with if you need all windows appear on a single screen at the same time? In example for certain use cases I want to split in a quarter layout. Does Niri support two windows tiled bottom half and top half?
Edit: Found shortcuts that enable this in Karousel. Hmm, I start digging this now. I really don’t want to switch off KDE, but if I do, Niri might be a contender as next option. Need to see if this workflow works for me. :-)
For 4 windows in one workspace, you can create two columns, each split in half. Something like this:
If you want more windows, you can shrink a column to 25%, then add a new column at 25% as well. Like this:
Yup! That’s just a single column divided in two:
Thanks, I figured out how to do this in Karousel right after I asked you. Hmm, do you miss a specific feature from your previous auto tiling experience? What I really like about this setup is, that certain windows will respect their sizes. To be honest this was a bit annoying in auto tilers. Guess there is less need for application specific rules and handling.
Offtopic: I just noticed your “Show Sidebar” button is on the same place as mine in Firefox.
Well, autotilers are better for automatically fitting things on screen. If you want multiple windows to fit in screen in Niri, you’ll need to intervene for that (it’s pretty simple and easy, but it’s not automatic).
This is the only thing that keeps going through my mind as being objectively worse. Some small things are different, not necessarily worse or better. I think the column logic in Niri is super easy to understand, which is great, but it kinda limits tiling possibilities (not a big deal tbh, you just learn new ways to tile).