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) :)
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).