feel free to list other window managers you’ve used.
I have been happy with bspwm, but considering trying something else. I love its simplicity and immense customizability. I like that it is shell scriptable, but it is not a deal breaker feature for me.
I like how the binary split model makes any custom partition possible.
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i3 and sway
XMonad. Been using it for almost a decade, and very powerful. I3 I hear is also good.
I prefer the way XMonad handles multimonitor workspaces, but left for Sway due to wayland support.
need to give it a try. I’m stuck in the past times lol
Same here, but I’m about ready to accept Wayland… Seems like sway is the best option?
I haven’t used XMonad in a long time, but it was my go-to for a few years. It was solid. The main issue is that you configure it in Haskell, and I don’t know Haskell.
I’ve been using i3. Nothing super advanced but the config is easy and being able to reload in place is nice
i3 is what I’ve been using the past few years. I’ve tried others, but I always end back up with i3 as I’ve found nothing else to be as simple and efficient for my workflow, with 12 workspaces across 2 monitors.
i3 gang rise up!
I’ve only tried i3 and it just works, so I stuck with it. After learning the hotkeys it never seems to get in the way (at least for my usage). Riced it a bit. Then some polybar sparkled in there. A wallpaper. What more can a guy want?
i3 all the way
Sorry to be the boring i3 user but it’s a rock solid TWM. Plus I am using the autotiling mod and now it’s even better :D
Sway, but single window capture and the animations make hyprland very tempting…
My heart still belongs to enlightenment/e17 but I’ve been using i3 for the past few years, and then hyprland for the last 4 months or so. It’s working out well.
Man e16 was the shit. If it played nice with hot-plugging monitors, I’d still use it today. It had some awesome themes, too.
What’s e17 like? I’ve truthfully never used it, though I daily Terminology as a terminal emulator.
Ahhh, e17 - I’ve got memories of building it from either cvs or svn at the time as soon as it was announced by rasterman on Slashdot.
e17 was my daily driver for a long time. It looked very pretty, before compositing was even a thing on the desktop, all without sacrificing performance. The biggest downside was that it wrote its configs as binary blobs which frequently broke as new development releases came out.
i3 is the one I keep coming back to
Starting with i3 as my first, i tried a bunch of different ones. Xmonad and Qtile were the ones i liked the most but Qtile was buggy and Xmonad while working was super confusing to configure with haskell.
Also tried AwesomeWM, it felt a bit buggy to me in terms of window handling and DWM was just too complicated to patch and even with patches it was too basic
Ended up going back to i3, and then moved over to Sway.
i3 until the day I die
Edit: Why? Because I love how easy it is to get working, it’s a nice balance between features and simplicity for me, and IPC features are great for some QoL plugins. Its configuration file format is simple enough, I like lua with wezterm and neovim but I don’t really see the point with a WM, I just need to see my windows when I want, the way I want, and to switch to others.
Can you list some QoL mods for i3? I have been using autotiling for the last few months and it’s great.
I too would be interested to know what plugins you use.
I love i3 and have used it for years and find myself fruitlessly using the most common keybinds in windows at work.
But my gripes over i3 are:
- If I don’t know the name of the command, say a specific settings window, etc - then I’m hosed if I need it.
- It doesn’t come with a lock screen by default, you need a plugin for it
Here’s a list of plugins that may be useful:
- kitti3: quake style dropdown terminal
- tdrop: the same as kitti3, but I moved to wezterm due to kitty’s design choice and tdrop fits the bill, it’s also wm agnostic.
- i3-volume: integrates with dunst for me to pop up volume status when I change volume via keybinds.
- autotiling: A must have in my opinion. I seldom have more than 2 windows on a monitor, since I have two monitors and utilize other workspace, but there are times when I temporarily have multiple windows open and too lazy to group them into stacks or tabs.
- i3expo: I heard people have success with this as an alt-tabber with visualization. I just use dmenu and have scripts for window switching.
- wmfocus: quite useful if you have multiple monitors and multiple windows on each, instead of doing Super + h a few times to move to the left most window, I just use wmfocus and hop to it immediately.
- i3-extras: I just found this, perhaps it’s of use.
Regarding your gripe #1, I don’t quite understand? Do you mean you don’t know the command of a program to type into your terminal to launch?
And gripe #2, if you mean i3lock, I’m okay with that, I like that i3 follows UNIX philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well, and because of that good i3lock forks exist! If it was baked into i3 then this might not be the case.
For i3-lock, I currently use i3lock-fancy-rapid, it’s a weird name lol, but it is still dependent on the i3lock-color binary, which itself is a fork of i3lock.
DWM
PaperVM. Works under gnome and has everything i need
Recently I have been using river. It’s extremely easy to configure via a shell script, and it’s very fast and stable. It’s another dwm clone
Currently, I am using DWL and it is pretty nice. After moving to Wayland, I tried to use Sway for a while, but it does not really fit into my workflow well. But to be honest, even DWL is missing some things I want, and I am not really a fan of that it is written and configured in C. I am planning on trying to write my own tiling window manager in Rust when I have some time.
