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) :)
I’ve been using Niri for a little under a year now on both my desktop and laptop, I like it a lot compared to regular tiling window managers (I used QTile for 2-3 years on my desktop and Hyprland on my laptop for about a year until I found out about vaxry).
Personally, I usually group my workspaces by app category (e.g. browser, system-related, chat windows, games, etc.) which works really well with a scrolling model since you can have multiple “fullscreen” apps per workspace, or a fullscreen apps and half-width app like a file explorer for dragging files over to the main app. It also works well for me since I am unlikely to have more than 2-3 full-width apps in the same category.
I like organizing things that way because it makes my hotkeys consistent for the thing I’m trying to do. For example, if I have a chat window open, my hotkey to get there will always be meta+3 regardless of what app it is and how many other chat apps I have open.