Well, keep in mind that based on the author's "street cred", they are only 20. I think many of us would agree that when we were 20 our tolerance for all sorts of tinkering and BS in software was almost infinite compared to what it became after several years in the workforce or having a family.
I only bring this up because I have seen a dozen or more tiling WMs come and go over the past 20 years, many of which were touted as being "the future." The reality is that the most productivity-enhancing features from tiling WMs were integrated into all the major window managers ages ago, and pure tiling WMs will forever be a niche product.
That means to use them effectively you're going to need to invest a lot of time and effort for realistically incremental gains in productivity, and in return you get the side effect of niche products like these having a lots of rough edges.
I feel like all of the cool things about tiling window managers were actually all of the things other than the tiling. They have style, they're lightning fast, they're stable, they're customizable. They have practically a non-existent footprint in terms of resource consumption.
It's their superpower, and also they tile if you're into that. I never fell into a particularly useful workflow with tiling window managers myself, but as an invitation into the world of alternative lightweight Linux window managers, it's one of the most powerful demonstrations of the things Linux can do great.
Only time running a tile VM was Sway while developing on a Raspberry Pi 2 doing full stack. Front-end and back-end are both in statically located applications, web browser and terminal. Other Wayland VMs could not run smoothly on it.
I find standard layer style VMs work better for desktop development. Same with being a daily driver. More dynamic moving parts with applications opening and closing ore often.
I was likewise. And I found that my workflow was very compatible with tiling window managers. I used splits for temporary apps (like a 30 sec diversion into a terminal) but otherwise dedicated an entire workspace/screen to each app. It's a marginal improvement over Gnome, things are more likely to be in the right place out-of-the-gate (and, honestly, how often do you actually need to z-stack windows?).
I initially thought that an even better WM would be in the realm of an real-time strategy game camera: an infinite 2D canvas with "keybindable" locations+zooms. Niri has convinced me that my idea was too complicated, and it hits the perfect spot between functionality and usability.
It's like technology gifted to us by aliens from the future.
I think that's how most people work. I watched a colleague use his MacBook for react dev and all of his windows were just...like whatever size and position they opened at, but never full screen? My 3 monitor brain couldn't compute lol.
I have a laptop, 24" centered horizontal centered and a 24" vertical monitor and do a vertical half split for Spotify/teams/shell/outlook, with docs on the laptop screen and ide on the main window full screen. And virtual desktops for design/research, dev and personal.
Sticking with the standard monitor sizes instead of 4k or ultrawide makes screen sharing way simpler as well!
Small gripe, Modern UI design with 10px of padding around everything means most apps and pages HAVE to be full screen to get anything done.
This is me exactly haha. What I really want is just gnome with a little more tiling capability for the rare occasion, like thirds and quarters. But the majority of my tiling needs are in the terminal and tmux is the hero
PaperWM is almost exactly what Niri is in a Gnome extension form. It might actually also be the first to implement that kind of workflow.
https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM
They follow ubuntu releases, kind of. The downside, they went all in into their new desktop env - cosmic, and until they release it they won't move on from 20.04..
I really loved the tiling feature in PopOS 20.04 which came out of the box. But then I bought a new laptop, and had to move to arch to use it..
Tiling Assistant might be worth a try. It can be configured to be pretty out of the way and just add more snapping sizes, different per-monitor if you need.
I only use tiling when I'm coding, so I have a shortcut to a script that tiles all the open windows and gives the main window around 60% of the screen width.
I am an i3 convert, but I feel this is very useful, if you don't want a full-blown tiling extension, but want some of the convenience of tiling, this is such a simple solution!
Perhaps the biggest usage difference I'll make switching between a floating and tiling window manager is how I swap windows in those positions. In the tiling case I'll create tabbed containers and position the container tiles accordingly. Then any time I want to switch it's selecting a tab in the container. In the floating use case I just switch and position individually. Most of the time the tabbed container is the easier workflow, rarely the floating one can be a better fit - just depends on what exactly I'm doing at the time.
Overall the difference is relatively tiny and what I really end up wanting to get close to regardless of the tools I'm using is something like that Windows 10 beta period where you could put different applications as tabs in the same window, have the workspace/zone based tiling gestures + shortcuts, but have new things just default to floating windows until I assign them.
In the end... so long as I can position the window somewhere within 2 seconds it really doesn't matter much.
I used to do that when I had a two-monitor setup - one full-screen window per monitor. Now that I have one 4K monitor I usually have two windows side by side, and very occasionally quartered (sometimes of course also one window on one side and two on the other). Not sure if this "workflow" would lend itself to a tiling window manager (never tried one), because some of the windows are also stacked?
I'll occasionally do quarters. Especially half on one side, two quarter-windows on the other, for a 3-window arrangement. On Mac.
My key bindings are a little different because I use the defaults in Spectacle to do it. More than a decade like that. Program's discontinued but still works and has never given me so much as one problem this entire time, so I'm going to keep using it until it stops working.
Yeah, I haven't seen a way to change the keybindings so they match my muscle memory. My current set-up is "brew install spectacle", cmd+space+"spect"+return, tick the checkbox to run at startup, then never think about it again—even if there were a way, I'd also have to go to the trouble of scripting the keybinding changes to make it this easy.
Ah, looks promising, and I bet I can figure out how to add the rest with that as an example and some light Web searching.
I use all of those except center, plus Cmd+Ctrl+[left, right] for top quarters left and right, and Cmd+Ctrl+Shift+[left, right] for lower quarters left and right.
I thought that was a totally different program, not a fork? If it's a fork, I guess that simplifies figuring out which alternative to switch to the first time Spectacle gives me any trouble at all.
It says “based on” in the README, which could just mean “inspired by”, but it’s also in the license so I thought that it was an actual fork. Looking at the actual history would reveal the answer, but idk, works basically the same.
That and the apple touchpad to swipe three fingers left and right to switch desktops (and different machines as one desktop is remote desked into a windows box and another terminal+tmux session to a linux box).
Me too. For most things I want all the screen space for the one thing I'm working on. Occasionally I need to look at two things. I almost never need to look at more than two things and I don't have a 100" screen anyway so there wouldn't be space.
I must also be a caveman, I have at most 4 windows open, they are pretty much full screen, and I swap between them with a mouse. I don't even have that many browser tabs open at any given time, maybe 5-10 max. I feel old when I see kids these days using fancy window managers with custom ergo keyboards and no mice, while they hack away in neovim (is that still cool?) and chat on a platform I don't even know exists yet.
Depends. Do you use 49" 3.5:1 ultra wide screen, or a 24" 4:3? If the latter, probably not. If the former, there should be questions. Potentially lots of questions.
I only bring this up because I have seen a dozen or more tiling WMs come and go over the past 20 years, many of which were touted as being "the future." The reality is that the most productivity-enhancing features from tiling WMs were integrated into all the major window managers ages ago, and pure tiling WMs will forever be a niche product.
That means to use them effectively you're going to need to invest a lot of time and effort for realistically incremental gains in productivity, and in return you get the side effect of niche products like these having a lots of rough edges.