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.)
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.