I'm still waiting for killer demo for switching from x.org/i3 to wayland/whatever next tiling. At least there are options now in Wayland other than sway, but hyprland currently is not motivating enough when demos mostly focus on eyecandy. Transitions especially are excess.
That being said I'm glad that Hyprland exists and shows people that there is power in minimalism. Fluxbox was my first love..
chrismorgan 2 hours ago [-]
I used i3 previously (2013–2016), and after a few years back on Windows (2016–2021), decided to try Sway on my current laptop (mid-2021), which happens to have a 1.5× panel.
Not everything has always been smooth, but at some point when I was needing to do screen sharing via Zoom I had to switch back to i3, and the comparison was more stark than I remembered.
On i3:
Tearing (graphical glitches) is terrible, especially if you’re doing screen sharing. I can’t use my XF86AudioMicMute key because its keycode is 256 and X only supports 8-bit codes. The touchpad doesn’t work well. Scaling stuff is a total mess, a mess that you can mostly get to work, but you’ll need to set four different environment variables and run a gsettings daemon and set these three properties and add this file to this location and that one to that and modify your Chromium flags and I probably even forgot a couple of steps.
On Wayland:
Tearing is solved. I had to modify the keymap to get XF86AudioMicMute¹, which I suspect was because of X compatibility, but then it works. The touchpad works very well, gestures, scroll rates and all. Scaling is robust and automatic, if you have an integer scaling factor or are willing to settle for render-at-next-integer-and-downsample, which is a bad technique but good enough for Apple; and compositors now support proper fractional scaling, and apps are more commonly implementing it (though I’m distressed it took so long). Firefox Nightly has just this week finally fixed the last problem that I’ve noticed, and I hope they’ll default-enable Wayland fractional scaling and Wayland soon.
The only thing I feel Sway’s behind in now is its lack of per-window screen sharing. Other than that, it’s very solidly better than i3 in every way: in convenience (things work better out of the box), in robustness (features that exist don’t have issues) and in features.
—⁂—
¹ Ran `xkbcomp $DISPLAY keymap.xkb`, then modified that file by changing `maximum = 255;` to `maximum = 256;`, and adding in appropriate places `<I256> = 256;` and `key <I256> { [ XF86AudioMicMute ] };`. Then, in ~/.config/sway/config, `input * xkb_file "~/.config/sway/keymap.xkb"` or similar.
arghwhat 18 minutes ago [-]
> The only thing I feel Sway’s behind in now is its lack of per-window screen sharing.
That's available in sway/wlroots master with xdg-desktop-portal-wlr master. Will be in next release.
dghf 39 minutes ago [-]
For me, it was getting a laptop with a high DPI screen, and the frustrations in getting X to play nicely with that.
There were annoyances when I realised I could no longer use certain workhorses (e.g. feh), but usually a bit of digging turned up a drop-in replacement (e.g. imv).
gorgoiler 2 hours ago [-]
I moved from i3 to sway — an i3 clone built as a Wayland compositor — specifically to banish screen tearing from my experience.
Wayland’s architecture makes tearing inherently less likely not the least reason being that the compositor synchronizes all drawing with the display rate. X11 is much more of a free for all.
boomskats 2 hours ago [-]
Give Niri a few days of your time. It's exactly what you're looking for.
kahnclusions 3 hours ago [-]
If you use i3, you can switch to Sway.
dugmartin 2 hours ago [-]
And if you want a solid integrated i3/Sway desktop I'd recommend checking out Regolith (https://regolith-desktop.com/). I've been running it for years and its great.
christophilus 7 hours ago [-]
Hyprland has become pretty popular, maybe in part due to DHH promoting it a bit. But in my opinion, Niri is where it's at. If you're into this sort of thing and haven't tried Niri, I'd highly recommend it. The scrolling approach to window management is incredibly nice for my workflow.
bashtoni 6 hours ago [-]
One thing I love about Hyprland (and Sway, which I was using before it) is the ability to have a key-combination which takes me straight to where I want.
Is this possible on Niri, where the virtual desktop expands infinitely?
gorgoiler 5 hours ago [-]
Not OP, but my take on this from using i3/sway for years was realizing that I often had two kinds of windows open.
Important long lived ones would be on workspaces where I could jump to them by number. I would have sound mixer and music on 1, mail and instant messaging on 2, browser on 3, then dev stuff or admin tasks etc on 4+. These would stretch horizontally, of course.
What I found was the “+” in “4+” could often be quite a lot of windows. I might have to reference some PDF in order to fill out a form in another PDF, and open a new browser window to manage some other reference document, and screenshots for the final draft, and terminals for taking temporary notes, maybe an image editor to trim screenshots, etc.*
With niri, I still have the “1234” layout but these are now rows with keyboard shortcuts. The ad hoc windows that get pushed onto and popped off my mental context stack grow rightwards… as a stack!
For me, niri’s brilliance is giving me those two axes. Known topics with keyboard navigation on the vertical axis. Ad-hoc tasks within each topic on a push/pop context stack on the horizontal axis.
*Ironically, these multi-window tasks were always the most mundane! Form filling for a mortgage application, say, or managing a report review for multiple authors. Software engineering — one of the more complicated things one can do on a computer, is all very neatly contained inside an IDE / tmux+vim+sh.
chills 4 hours ago [-]
In addition to sibling commenter, niri exposes everything over an IPC accessible via its cli (or a socket), so if you wanted, say, a keybind to switch to your terminal, no matter where it is, you could bind it to this:
Nice! I have a jq/ipc based abomination of a run-or-raise equivalent that works spectacularly well, including cycling windows in order. I keep saying I'll stick it in a repo.
3836293648 7 hours ago [-]
Having tried Niri, it's probising but very much not ready for primetime yet. And extremely miserable to use without a trackpad, as opposed to all other tiling WMs that are keyboard first.
kuuchuu 6 hours ago [-]
It has felt very "keyboard first" for me. The hotkeys are very customizable.
likeclockwork 5 hours ago [-]
Agreed. I don't find automatic tiling that useful in general because you don't really get strong layout control but I also never found say i3 or manual tiling that useful on a small laptop screen. (It's pretty nice on a large screen or ultrawide, though)
However Niri works fantastically in both use cases because it gives me what I really want: Resizable, rearrangeable columns of windows, as many as I need for the current task and a way to quickly rearrange and spatially navigate so that I can see exactly what I need to see.
weikju 7 hours ago [-]
I second this. I first got exposed to this concept via the gnome extension, PaperWM. Now using Niri as well.
no_carrier 13 minutes ago [-]
Niri looks promising to me. After I discovered PaperWM I moved on to Material Shell, which was still the best workflow I've come across to date. It was basically gnome with a 2d grid: you could scroll workspaces left and right and then again on the vertical axis. The author sort of abandoned it (it was a Gnome extension) in order to go all in on their own desktop environment with the same concept. I'm guessing that'll take a while to get off the ground.
jeena 7 hours ago [-]
It looks similar with the difference of scrolling. Kind of interesting, and you still can have stacks of windows. But how does it decide on how wide a window should be?
bayesianbot 6 hours ago [-]
Usually you'd have some predefined widths, like 33%, 50% and 67%, and use a shortcut to cycle between them. And you can define window rules to start some applications with different width than your default.
edit: and as fellow niri user, I recommend people try it. I think it's one of the easiest tiling WMs to get into, it feels very natural within minutes.
TiredOfLife 4 hours ago [-]
The horizontal scrolling was the only thing i HATED about Windows 8. It's nauseating
neebz 4 hours ago [-]
Looks super interesting. Has anyone here tried a keyboard-first tiling window manager on macOS? Any recommendations?
sgt 3 hours ago [-]
Can anyone explain why tiling managers are useful? Seems like a waste of space to me. I prefer having my various windows all over the place and just alt-tabbing between (or using other means of opening the right app). I highly prefer having the app I am working on to be in the center of the screen, so that is what makes sense for me.
vidarh 31 minutes ago [-]
They're useful to let you not have to think about positioning windows with precision. If that doesn't feel useful to you, then maybe a tiling wm isn't right for you. My wm has an "escape" in that I can define floating desktops, and by default I have one, mostly used for file management, because there are things where I agree it's better to have floating/overlapping windows.
It doesn't really matter if it's a "waste of space" - I have two large monitors, and 10 virtual desktops to spread windows between (I'd add more, but I haven't felt the need). To the point where my setup, by default, centers the window with large margins when I have just one window open on a screen because it's more comfortable (and I'm just one keypress away from fullscreening the app anyway).
Most of the time I use tiling because I like not having to care about the layout beyond those defaults.
But I can also configure specific layouts. E.g. I have desktop dedicated to my todo list, a list of done items, and notes, and it has a fixed layout that ensures those windows are always in the same placement, on the same desktop.
jamiejquinn 2 hours ago [-]
If you've tried it and it doesn't fit, that seems fine, it's all just personal workflow.
For me it's pure speed at getting to where I need to go. My notes live on workspace 1, my main workspace on 2 and browser on 3, so I'm just a single key combination away from most of what I need. Can still alt+tab if I like.
cadamsdotcom 3 hours ago [-]
Give Rectangle a go. I’ve used it for years and love it.
Thirds, quarters, sixths. Move windows to the next screen. Increase and decrease size.. so many nice things you can do with just the keyboard.
Its keyboard shortcuts are so deeply in my brain I could rattle them off while operating heavy machinery :)
+1 for AeroSpace. I have been i3/sway user for about a decade and was really missing similar experience on Mac. All the previous ones came with gotchas or were nowhere near the usability of i3/sway.
AeroSpace is almost there, it has a few quirks and annoyances and is missing some features but it's close enough that it's now my daily driver for client work requiring being on a Mac.
Highly recommended and hopefully it continues to evolve. Also hoping that the churn in macOS is not going to kill it for some unexpected reason.
As far as Hyprland, I tried it and when I got to a setup that I felt comfortable I realized that I had basically replicated my Sway setup with no added benefits so I just switched back to Sway. I'm not much into ricing anyway. I mostly want the chrome to stay out of my way.
That said, for people unfamiliar with i3/Sway, Hyprland could be a great way of getting into tiling so I'm definitely rooting for them!
cheema33 5 hours ago [-]
Slightly off-topic rant: Demos with apps/terminals that use translucent backgrounds befuddle me. In this demo at one point he is showing some code that is syntax highlighted. Some text is grey with background that is also grey/white. Good luck reading that!
Why do people do this?
jeena 5 hours ago [-]
I'm demoing my own system, this is how I set it up and this is how I use it and the transparency is a integral part of the esthetic.
Having said that, I guess the compression of the video makes it less sharp and contrasty as it is in real life. But all code is shared in the original with a link in the description if someone really wants to dig deeper into it.
indy 2 hours ago [-]
Thank you for posting the video and making your config public.
As a recent hyprland user it's really useful being able to pick out the features I like and incorporating them into my setup.
Rendered at 10:07:07 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
That being said I'm glad that Hyprland exists and shows people that there is power in minimalism. Fluxbox was my first love..
Not everything has always been smooth, but at some point when I was needing to do screen sharing via Zoom I had to switch back to i3, and the comparison was more stark than I remembered.
On i3:
Tearing (graphical glitches) is terrible, especially if you’re doing screen sharing. I can’t use my XF86AudioMicMute key because its keycode is 256 and X only supports 8-bit codes. The touchpad doesn’t work well. Scaling stuff is a total mess, a mess that you can mostly get to work, but you’ll need to set four different environment variables and run a gsettings daemon and set these three properties and add this file to this location and that one to that and modify your Chromium flags and I probably even forgot a couple of steps.
On Wayland:
Tearing is solved. I had to modify the keymap to get XF86AudioMicMute¹, which I suspect was because of X compatibility, but then it works. The touchpad works very well, gestures, scroll rates and all. Scaling is robust and automatic, if you have an integer scaling factor or are willing to settle for render-at-next-integer-and-downsample, which is a bad technique but good enough for Apple; and compositors now support proper fractional scaling, and apps are more commonly implementing it (though I’m distressed it took so long). Firefox Nightly has just this week finally fixed the last problem that I’ve noticed, and I hope they’ll default-enable Wayland fractional scaling and Wayland soon.
The only thing I feel Sway’s behind in now is its lack of per-window screen sharing. Other than that, it’s very solidly better than i3 in every way: in convenience (things work better out of the box), in robustness (features that exist don’t have issues) and in features.
—⁂—
¹ Ran `xkbcomp $DISPLAY keymap.xkb`, then modified that file by changing `maximum = 255;` to `maximum = 256;`, and adding in appropriate places `<I256> = 256;` and `key <I256> { [ XF86AudioMicMute ] };`. Then, in ~/.config/sway/config, `input * xkb_file "~/.config/sway/keymap.xkb"` or similar.
That's available in sway/wlroots master with xdg-desktop-portal-wlr master. Will be in next release.
There were annoyances when I realised I could no longer use certain workhorses (e.g. feh), but usually a bit of digging turned up a drop-in replacement (e.g. imv).
Wayland’s architecture makes tearing inherently less likely not the least reason being that the compositor synchronizes all drawing with the display rate. X11 is much more of a free for all.
Is this possible on Niri, where the virtual desktop expands infinitely?
Important long lived ones would be on workspaces where I could jump to them by number. I would have sound mixer and music on 1, mail and instant messaging on 2, browser on 3, then dev stuff or admin tasks etc on 4+. These would stretch horizontally, of course.
What I found was the “+” in “4+” could often be quite a lot of windows. I might have to reference some PDF in order to fill out a form in another PDF, and open a new browser window to manage some other reference document, and screenshots for the final draft, and terminals for taking temporary notes, maybe an image editor to trim screenshots, etc.*
With niri, I still have the “1234” layout but these are now rows with keyboard shortcuts. The ad hoc windows that get pushed onto and popped off my mental context stack grow rightwards… as a stack!
For me, niri’s brilliance is giving me those two axes. Known topics with keyboard navigation on the vertical axis. Ad-hoc tasks within each topic on a push/pop context stack on the horizontal axis.
*Ironically, these multi-window tasks were always the most mundane! Form filling for a mortgage application, say, or managing a report review for multiple authors. Software engineering — one of the more complicated things one can do on a computer, is all very neatly contained inside an IDE / tmux+vim+sh.
However Niri works fantastically in both use cases because it gives me what I really want: Resizable, rearrangeable columns of windows, as many as I need for the current task and a way to quickly rearrange and spatially navigate so that I can see exactly what I need to see.
edit: and as fellow niri user, I recommend people try it. I think it's one of the easiest tiling WMs to get into, it feels very natural within minutes.
It doesn't really matter if it's a "waste of space" - I have two large monitors, and 10 virtual desktops to spread windows between (I'd add more, but I haven't felt the need). To the point where my setup, by default, centers the window with large margins when I have just one window open on a screen because it's more comfortable (and I'm just one keypress away from fullscreening the app anyway).
Most of the time I use tiling because I like not having to care about the layout beyond those defaults.
But I can also configure specific layouts. E.g. I have desktop dedicated to my todo list, a list of done items, and notes, and it has a fixed layout that ensures those windows are always in the same placement, on the same desktop.
For me it's pure speed at getting to where I need to go. My notes live on workspace 1, my main workspace on 2 and browser on 3, so I'm just a single key combination away from most of what I need. Can still alt+tab if I like.
Thirds, quarters, sixths. Move windows to the next screen. Increase and decrease size.. so many nice things you can do with just the keyboard.
Its keyboard shortcuts are so deeply in my brain I could rattle them off while operating heavy machinery :)
AeroSpace is almost there, it has a few quirks and annoyances and is missing some features but it's close enough that it's now my daily driver for client work requiring being on a Mac.
Highly recommended and hopefully it continues to evolve. Also hoping that the churn in macOS is not going to kill it for some unexpected reason.
As far as Hyprland, I tried it and when I got to a setup that I felt comfortable I realized that I had basically replicated my Sway setup with no added benefits so I just switched back to Sway. I'm not much into ricing anyway. I mostly want the chrome to stay out of my way.
That said, for people unfamiliar with i3/Sway, Hyprland could be a great way of getting into tiling so I'm definitely rooting for them!
Why do people do this?
Having said that, I guess the compression of the video makes it less sharp and contrasty as it is in real life. But all code is shared in the original with a link in the description if someone really wants to dig deeper into it.
As a recent hyprland user it's really useful being able to pick out the features I like and incorporating them into my setup.