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 used it ever since riverwm had its 0.4 update or whatever it was.
Someone described it as objectively better than i3-like tilling because every window can be full size or tiled more traditionally with the same ergonomics, and they were right.
Hmm but sway can do full screen apps in a workspace too with tabs. I think the title of the window is arguably more important than showing a little piece of the window when navigating
Is that navigated with the same commands as focus window up/down/etc, not a separate tab command? I’ve used sway more recently than i3, but it’s been a while.
And for me it’s not about showing a piece of the window necessarily, but how it can feel like it gives you an invisible 20% extra on either side of your monitor. It’s a lot like how tiling wms in general feel like they unlock something in laptops. Kinda hard to explain.
Yes, mod+arrow in tabbed mode which is the same for focusing in tile mode. It feels very ergonomic
I use tabbed mode for my laptop as well because of limited screen real estate.