Switch to a tiling-window-manager TODAY | Hacker News Reader

Switch to a tiling-window-manager TODAY

github.com

16 pointsuint2318 comments

After trying i3 and then hyprland for a few weeks, I found myself missing the boring UI of standard macos apps, being able to drag windows around anywhere and snap them with Rectangle.

My take on Rectangle for Windows: https://github.com/StackWM

The biggest i3wm issue I still have is that I can't just do the equivalent of "Hey spawn this window over there with these dimensions"

No, I have to first specify a window with some regex which will "swallow" the application window name and if I want to specify other dimension parameters well good luck.

It's also frustrating to have an unexpected reboot, and not being able to restore all the containers and their windows.

Though perhaps most of these are X11 limitations and are not present on Sway?

Oh, nice I didn't know about hyprland as an option on Wayland. I (just yesterday) installed and started using swaywm (Wayland fork of i3). I have to say that so far I really like the change.

MacOS without Rectangle is the most tediously frustrating bullshit. I really hate how much time is spent fidgeting and sorting windows. Windows isn't much better but at least it's Rectangle-like out of the box.

hyprland has gotten pretty awesome. I've been using it for a couple years now and there was a time where it was frustrating because it was changing so fast. If you look around github you can find some decent default configs to start from. It plays pretty nicely with a dotfile manager (I use yadm) lets you put source = ~/pathto a source file so you can do some shenanigans with the dotfile manager to customize your config per computer you run on automagically (i.e. I have one for monitors, exec, binds to customize monitors between my desktop and laptop, screen resolution and a few other configs on my keybinds for stuff lik,e remote rdp connections, and things that get executed automatically that vary slightly between my laptop and desktop.)

I'm a 16yo developer making a real world project that I and others can use on a daily basis. The aim for sxwm is that it's a really easy to configure (syntax-wise) tiling-window-manager that doesn't need to be patched and is incomplete like DWM or is bloated like i3. It has less LOC than DWM too which is a plus.

If you are thinking of switching to a tiling window manager, this is a great option to mess around and see if you enjoy it!

A small suggestion regarding framing, you might find yourself getting a friendlier welcome if instead of putting other software down, you instead highlight why yours is good. For example, instead of saying i3 is bloated, you could say your project is more lightweight than i3. Similarly, instead of saying DWM is incomplete, you can say yours is more feature complete than DWM. It might feel like a small difference, but attitudes and first impressions matter, especially as you can see from the other comments in this thread. You don't have to put others down to lift yourself up.

Yeah this is good advice. You don’t bring yourself up by trash-talking others down.

By what measure is i3 bloated out of interest?

"Bloated" is just the standard complaint to go for if you don't have anything specific to complain about but don't like a piece of software for, what I assume are, theological reasons.

Congratulations on the project! This is an impressive feat at any age. Personally, I love how you found your own balance between extreme minimalism and a useful set of features, arriving at a solution that is indeed below 2k lines of C code. That kind of thinking is not a quality every software developer has, and you could make a career out of it if you decide to work professionally in this field.

> incomplete like DWM or is bloated like i3. It has less LOC than DWM too which is a plus.

Can you elaborate on this?

Talking about bloat while relying on X11 instead of Wayland, in these times?

Tss...

> It has less LOC than DWM too which is a plus.

Why? Especially as an end user.

For an end user this needs to be translated. Fewer lines of code mean better long-term maintainability. It could also mean better stability and less bugs. However, that is not granted as you can introduce pretty severe bugs also with few lines of code. And of course the less lines of code, the less features a program has. But if you're happy with that, it is a good thing.

But yeah, that still leaves a lot of questions that can be answered much better if not using the lines of code argument.

I used ratpoison for a while 30 years ago on a 4:3 screen, it was OK, but I did not like some windows being large. I went back to vtwm, which I like, along with twm.

On these 16:9 screens, I cannot imagine using a tiling WM, I tend to leave the right part of these screens open for various monitors, and the IconManager.

But to me cwm is a great compromise and I use that on screens with low resolutions, like 1368x768.

But, this WM looks interesting, I may give it a spin.

Bspwm for me because the config is just any executable file, like a bash script, which makes customizing things and automating things way easier.

It even has a macos counterpart yabai which is good enough for what I do.

The submitted title is "Switch to a tiling-window-manager TODAY" which does not match the link.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com