I have a laptop with an 11 inch screen and 768p display. Naturally, my usage breakdown is:

  • 80% one window in fullscreen
  • 15% two windows side by side
  • 5% other

I’ve considered tiling window managers. I used i3wm on this in the past. It was a little complicated and I customized the bottom bar to show commands for dummies.

alt-Enter: term | alt-D: launch | alt-F: fullsc | alt-1: new workspace | alt-shift-1: move to workspace

That plus some battery, wifi, time info. I never got ‘good’ with i3 and would consult the cheat sheet regularly.

Is there a paradigm (tiling or otherwise) that would let me quickly and simply launch programs with the keyboard (like most distros these days) and switch between fullscreen windows? and set them side by side as needed?

My usage is keyboard-first but mouse-available. i3 didn’t seem tailored to mouse usage the way some other tiling wms are. and sometimes you’d launch a program like the wifi settings window and it wasn’t built to be resized for a twm, so it looked weird. (no floating window support.)

  • www-gem@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 hour ago

    I’ve carefully reviewed your post, and I may have overlooked the reasons why some believe you’re using Wayland, especially since you’re currently using i3. Anyway, I’ll talk about X11 ans Wayland options.

    i3 is indeed capable of launching programs via keybindings and supports full mouse functionality. However, it does require significant configuration. To be frank, all tiling WMs necessitate customization. Additionally, many tiling WMs benefit from the installation of a separate tool to serve as a panel bar. Tiling WMs share the concept of shipping with a functional minimal configuration, allowing users to tailor their setup precisely to their preferences.

    Here are - to my humble personal opinion - the “easiest” tiling WMs for X11:

    • i3: you know it
    • awesomewm: comes with a panel, menu, and widgets out of the box.
    • bspwm: very lightweight and minimalist. Unlike others, it will require the use of sxhkd to define keybindings. The config is shell-script based, which may feel easier to some compared to lua. This was my preferred option before moving to Wayland and having tried awesomewm, i3, and dwm for years.

    And for Wayland:

    • sway: drop-in replacement for i3. It uses the same keybindings/config style as i3.
    • niri: this one technically uses a “scrollable tiling” model (windows arranged in columns on an infinite strip) rather than the traditional tiling resizing. Due to this model approach, it could be intimated to you but it can achieve great things and may be just what you need for a 11" screen because you can have an infinite number of full/half screen windows that you can scroll horizontally or vertically (thanks to stackable windows and infinite workspaces number).

    Talking only about tiling WMs I’ve used, but there may be great/better options out there. You can quickly check the list of features on their respective github page and watch videos to see what each of them can offer. Detailing all their features here would not be digestible.

    Edit: except very few tiling WMs (I can think of two), they all fully support the mouse to click or move/resize windows.

    • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org
      1·
      17 hours ago

      I’ve carefully reviewed your post, and I may have overlooked the reasons why some believe you’re using Wayland, especially since you’re currently using i3.

      Yeah, i3 has no wayland support - that’s why sway exists. It is probably almost on par but worse documented.

      Apart from that, there is a reason that mayority of tiling WMs still run on X11: Wayland requires the WM to implement much more functionality by itself. That can be done by libraries but these are not yet as complete and mature as the X11 solutions.

    • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org
      1·
      17 hours ago

      I am using i3 as a backup interface at work when I can’t use stumpwm, and it is quite good to use with its default Debian / OpenSuSE config. Especially since it has very nice web docs.

      Also, i3 and sway have probably best Integration of all the little stuff that one gets normally from the desktop environment: Audio control, mounting of flash drives, session management, lock screen…

      What I don’t like so much about i3 is its complex nesting of windows that comes along with auto-placement. Stumpwm is much more logical to me. Also has better configurability and superb documentation.