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 tthe 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’ve been using Niri for a little under a year now on both my desktop and laptop, I like it a lot compared to regular tiling window managers (I used QTile for 2-3 years on my desktop and Hyprland on my laptop for about a year until I found out about vaxry).

Personally, I usually group my workspaces by app category (e.g. browser, system-related, chat windows, games, etc.) which works really well with a scrolling model since you can have multiple “fullscreen” apps per workspace, or a fullscreen apps and half-width app like a file explorer for dragging files over to the main app. It also works well for me since I am unlikely to have more than 2-3 full-width apps in the same category.

I like organizing things that way because it makes my hotkeys consistent for the thing I’m trying to do. For example, if I have a chat window open, my hotkey to get there will always be meta+3 regardless of what app it is and how many other chat apps I have open.

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 gotten used to using the noctalia-shell dock to unify my on-screen and off-screen windows / tiled window groups. Even if a window from my dock is active in a different workspace, clicking it in the dock from any other workspace switches to it immediately. Fundamentally it’s similar to managing floating windows. But now having different workspaces for different tasks makes sense to me for the first time. It lets me maximize space for groups of tiled windows. My whole life I’ve just disabled that shit immediately.

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

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.

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.

I had no idea these scripts existed, that’s awesome and i’ll have to take a look at tilemod in particular. I’ve tried niri a bunch of times but similar to you i feel like it’s too easy to lose windows. Not just on the same workspace, but i also wish other workspaces could be numbered so you can keep track of which workspaces have which windows on them. I know you’re supposed to use the overview for that, but i’m still not used to that type of workflow.

Another thing i would like is to have a more dynamic tiler style option where at the very least you can set it to have a window take up the full screen when it’s the only one on the workspace, and then split it side by side when two or more windows are opened. Mangowc’s scrolling layout supports this, and upstream niri could probably add this too, but it looks like this tilemod script can do the same thing.

Too much crap. My i3 configuration could be these 2 lines:

set penguin key as the mod

set $mod Mod4

Make Stacking the default

workspace_layout tabbed

I’ve worded it like shit before, but :

Standalone WMs are basically Gnome3 for neckbeards.