• ranzispa@mander.xyz
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    10 hours ago

    Years ago I had tried a tiling wm on a personal computer. It’s cool if you’re working with a lot of windows at the same time, also I like the idea of one workspace per software as it makes it very simple to switch from one to the other.

    However, I never felt those to be a good fit for when I work. At work I need a bunch of software open and I always felt having actual windows to be a bit simpler as you can easily move them around. A tiling WM always splits your screen, so you have to be careful where you open software and be moving it around.

    As such, I’ve been most time using KDE and have little complaints with it. Pretty much completely vanilla setup.

    However, recently I have heard of sliding window managers. I decided to try as it appeared cool, just to play with it a little bit. So far I’ve been using niri at my job for 4-5 months and I never felt I needed to switch back to KDE.

    It makes it simple to split the screen like a tiling wm, but you’re not limited to the screen space and you can have more windows in the same workspace that you easily scroll through.

    In the meanwhile you can have several workspaces and easily switch through them.

    One simple thing it allows me to do is: two terminals splitting the screen vertically for local/remote and besides a full screen IDE for coding. I can easily switch to test locally, remotely and adjust the code as I am testing without having to alt tab and find the correct window all the time.

    Give it a try, it’s pretty cool and quite simple to setup: it took me no more than half an hour to have the configuration I’m still using to this day using the noctalia shell. https://github.com/niri-wm/niri