Hacker News Reader

Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

But KDE allows all this _and_ allows windows to overlap. There are keyboard shortcuts for "take the left half of the screen" and "move focus to the window left of this one". How many windows does a typical i3 user have open anyway?

For tiling terminal apps, I just use the tiling feature of KDE's Konsole, and used to use Terminator.

View on HN

I'm a devops/sre type so, on my main (ultrawide) screen I have a browser 50% right, then 2 columns of terminals (usually vim) 50% left usually with 2 per column, often 3, sometimes stacks of the same under each other. This can be duplicated across workspaces as needed for different codebases.

Often I'll find I need to make arbitrary layouts on the fly when debugging an issue or responding to an outage, I can do this without having to engage my brain or reach for my mouse.

Can you do the same with floating WMs? Absolutely but you will probably need to think about, breaking your thought process. For me the i3 just does what I need it to without having to engage my brain or reach for the mouse.

If you're already running Linux I'd highly suggest giving i3 a go, it's hard (for me) to explain how it changed the way I interact with my computer and how much it improved my workflow. I think about the closes I can get is that it's like learning vi, sure nano can get text into a file but once you're used to vi you're going to be far more efficient.

As a VIM user I completely understand the sentiment of just having the machine do what you want it to do without having to engage the brain. Thank you for the recommendation.

"How many windows does a typical i3 user have open anyway?"

I have no idea I, just told you I use emacs as my window manager. Pretty sure that I don't come even close to any definition of typical.

A few things though. Every window manager I listed can do floating windows if you want. (Maybe not ratpoison) In my opinion overlapping windows is an anti-feature but it's possible for people with differing opinions.

It's a matter of workflow I suppose. I want tiling first. When I open a new program I want it to open in my currently focused tile every time. If I have a window in another tile, or not visible, I want to hit a couple keys and bring it into my focused tile. Not have to faff around switch to make a different window active and then re-tile it.

So sure you can use a floating wm as a tiling wm, sorta. And you can use a tiling wm as a floating wm, kinda. Pick the method you are going to use the most start there and then maybe throw in a little floating/tiling if you like.

I just wanted to point out about manual tiling managers. It seems like when tiling wms come up people say they tried xmonad or awesome and didn't like it. I absolutely hate auto-tiling managers but I like other tiling window managers.

Thank you. My query was not only to you but also to the HN crowd in general, and a few people have answered back. It is interesting seeing the different use cases. Thank you.

Quick count of how many I used to have open.

10 Workspaces. 2 GTD workspaces (Personal and Work...I know you shouldn’t separate them, but that’s how I liked it). That’s 10 Windows total.

3 main development workspaces, each with 2 terminals. 6 more.

2 Secondary development workspaces with 4 Windows each (for running search/git/tail, etc). 8 more.

2 browser workspaces with 3 browser Windows total.

1 other workspace for ad hoc tools. 1 window.

So about 28 Windows on a single monitor.

I see, thank you.

i3 and sway also allow windows to overlap, which is a very useful thing to do (eg for pop up boxes, pop up menus, etc.).

It’s just not the default.

If I want to work on N windows at a time, i3 handles their tiling semi-automatically. All windows that I’m not currently using are pushed into different workspaces.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com