Every time I try tiling window managers, I get disappointed by the fact that I cannot minimize windows. I guess it’s 20 years of Windows usage that has ingrained it into me but I like hiding windows I don’t currently need open. Apparently this goes against the whole philosophy tho lol

Niri + Noctalia FTW

I use Niri. It just feels right to me, having lots of space to stick windows (scroll horizontally, switch workspaces vertically).

It takes some getting used to, but the overview is helpful, and here’s always the window switcher if you “lost” a window. But what really changed the game for me were special “focus-or-spawn” keybindings with nirius, e.g. when I press Meta+B my browser opens, or if it is already open it is focused.

If you only want to use scrolling for some workspaces, you can have a look at Umbriel. It looks really interesting, I haven’t had time to try it out.

Anyone using it with multiple screens? I haven’t tried it out because it didn’t look like it would be great for that.

I want something really lightweight where I can assign things to workspaces and then pull workspaces easily onto any one of my screens.

XMonad was my favourite, but I’ve moved to Sway and I’ve got it set up pretty well now. Workspaces still have a home screen so it’s a bit more clunky to move them around between screens.

I freaking love niri

It’s easy to lose windows that are off-screen

By default. They should really change the defaults, but in config, you can make it so if there is a window to the side hidden, a piece is always visible.

It’s called struts.

layout {
    ...
    struts {
         left 16
         right 16
     }
}

It ensures a piece of the window is always visible

Plus with a bar like from QuickShell or WayBar you can see all open windows anyway up there.

To achieve this, I’ve been using Niri with the tilemod script. It helps make Niri behave more like a regular tiling.

The things you show in the gif are already possible with niri via Super + [ and Super + ] (default bindings) for placing into columns

It has limitations, but everything in the gif at least is already there. Niri actually has quite a bit of support for base tiling.

I can’t go back to non-scrolling ever. I even use a similar setup on my work machine (a Mac) via PaperWM.spoon, tho it isn’t as well integrated (bc it’s a mac and you’re forcing it to not be a mac)

EDIT: One tiling feature of niri I love is that with Super + W you can switch to a stacked mode like in a tiler. For KiCAD PCB editing, you have three windows - project, schematic, and pcb. It is essential that at the very least the project tab be stacked behind and out of the way imo, since there is no minimize

I’ve used it ever since riverwm had its 0.4 update or whatever it was.

Someone described it as objectively better than i3-like tilling because every window can be full size or tiled more traditionally with the same ergonomics, and they were right.

I’ve been trying to like them for the last year since migrating to wayland, but I really don’t. I’m about to go back to herbstluftwm.

Good on touchscreen devices. Elsewhere, not my cup of wm.

Me also a tiling guy, and since a few years I switched to KDE and use an extension called Krohnkite to tile windows automatically. I personally don’t like the idea of endless scrollable desktops. To get a taste, I tried a scrollable window manager extension for KDE, just to see if the workflow would click with me. To me it doesn’t feel different from (classic) floating style of managing windows. Why? Because I have to scroll and search for the window.