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by Novukus 2198 days ago
I moved to awesomewm a few years back and I absolutely love it. I can open half a dozen terminals at once and they'll all automatically be ordered in a way that's immediately useful to me, where all the terminals are visible and (largely, depending on the automatic layout set) equally sized. And if I want another layout, I just press one combination to cycle through all the layouts I've configured. tmux doesn't give me that kind of flexibility. It doesn't feel anywhere as fluid or seamless to switch between half a dozen (or more) terminals.

It means I can have an overview of a bunch of different things and keep terminals context-specific (1 terminal for htop, 1 for docker, 1 for whatever remote test environment, 1 for project A, 1 for project B, 1 for some other remote host I need for some reason, etc.) If I want to do a new task unrelated to anything I'm doing before, I don't need to break the context of an existing terminal, I just press Alt+Enter, it's automatically slotted into a place where it's completely visible and usable and I can do that task quickly. When I'm done, I can close it, again, without disturbing the context of all the other terminals. It's just incredibly freeing to have that and I feel it frees a lot of cognitive load by being able to go back to a terminal for a certain task and immediately see exactly where I was and what I did last.

Also, much like the other comments, I use task-specific virtual desktops all the time. First desktop is for all the terminals. Second is for browser/communication. Third is for project A. Fourth is documentation related to projA. Fifth is projB. Sixth can be more documentation. I often have 10 virtual desktops for different things. I don't want to imagine what it'd look like if I had it all on one desktop.

1 comments

Sorry to hijack your comment, but do you know of resources I can read to write my own custom layouts using awesomewm? I have a 21:9 monitor, and would like to write a layout where I can have a game running in 1080p + some windows on the side. Currently I do this just fine with floating windows, but surely there must be a way to use the tiling system.
Hah, it's probably possible, but awesomewm's documentation for this kind of thing isn't great. I've looked into it but was put off by the complexity since I don't have that much time to spend on that kind of thing. I did find a couple of links that might be helpful as a jumping off point?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5120399/setting-windows-...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45411844/before-diving-i...