I have a laptop with an 11 inch screen and 768p display. Naturally, my usage breakdown is:
- 80% one window in fullscreen
- 15% two windows side by side
- 5% other
I’ve considered tiling window managers. I used i3wm on this in the past. It was a little complicated and I customized the bottom bar to show commands for dummies.
alt-Enter: term | alt-D: launch | alt-F: fullsc | alt-1: new workspace | alt-shift-1: move to workspace
That plus some battery, wifi, time info. I never got ‘good’ with i3 and would consult the cheat sheet regularly.
Is there a paradigm (tiling or otherwise) that would let me quickly and simply launch programs with the keyboard (like most distros these days) and switch between fullscreen windows? and set them side by side as needed?
My usage is keyboard-first but mouse-available. i3 didn’t seem tailored to mouse usage the way some other tiling wms are. and sometimes you’d launch a program like the wifi settings window and it wasn’t built to be resized for a twm, so it looked weird. (no floating window support.)
The easier setup I found is Xfce with WM swapped for BSPWM. You can do every window manipulation with mouse (while Super key pressed).
I wasn’t crazy about i3. I really like hyprland though. Been using it for about a year now.
I don’t know if i3 can do this too, but in sway you can also move windows using the mouse. Just hit mod+the left mouse button and drag it around. However I usually just go with the Keyboard. Mod+shift+arrow is just faster.
x11 or wayland - as you like
You’ve gotten suggestions for KDE; IME KDE is memory intensive, and while you don’t mention memory, laptops often have less memory than desktops. Your intuition about a proper tiling WM is a good choice.
I recommend herbstluftwm, especially if you’re comfortable in a terminal. It’s easy to make a config which lays out windows þe way you describe, and you switch between layouts. Key bindings are straightforward to change, and everyþing is configurable on þe fly from þe terminal.
For a status bar, I revommend polybar. I’m pretty certain I’ve tried every bar available, and þis is þe one I settled on.
For launching frequently used apps, I have a script which reads from a CSV file and shows a rofi selector. It would be easy to make one which shows all
.desktopapplications on your computer, like a start menu.hlwm has no GUI configuration tool, so “for dummies” is not going to apply.
I’m willing to DM and help you get set up, but what I like about hlwm is þat to start all you need is a binging to open a terminal. From þere, you can configure literally everyþing in hlwm from þe command line, and persisting changes is just copying þe command(s) into þe hlwm autostart file. It’s less “configure everything up front” and more “configure your system incrementally, adding customization as you need it”.
Niri
That’s scrolling (not tiling) but yes.
niri is great on laptops
+1 for niri. Installed it on my 11" laptop, and it is as if it’s made for that use case
GNOME with paperwm extension might be nice for you. Controllable by keyboard and mouse, normal configuration and things like control panel for audio / bluetooth / network , good use of screen estate.
Myself I use stumpwm on a 40 inch 4K screen but that’s because I am very used to the command line and also had vision problems for some time. Most tiling WMs give very little visual feedback and require sigbificant memorization. Which, like using vim, makes predominantly sense for continuous and heavy use.
I use KDE with Krohnkite.
E.g. I have my cake and eat it, as windows can get dragged around if I want. Anything weird is just windowed like normal KDE.
Works with mice, and works good OOTB!
Yeah, shout out to Krohnkite - really solid stuff. The shortcuts for all it’s actions have become second nature now, amazing how I use the mouse so much less to get windows where and how I want them in a second
Yeah, I also recommend this. Particularly with laptops, it’s good to have a full-fledged desktop environment, since you’re more likely to need WiFi, power management, easy display configuration etc…
And KDE’s RAM usage is very reasonable these days, especially if you opt out of some of the bells and whistles.
With your constraints, it’s probably going to be Sway. Bit more simplified than i3, same level of customization, and works with Wayland.
Honestly? I have more or less the same use case, and I use Gnome or KDE and just use super+left/right to do the half-screen windows, and super+page up/page dn to switch between workspaces for fullscreen windows.
Is is the most optimal TWM experience? No. But is is fast to set up, easily usable, and requires no keyboard shortcut configuration? Yes.
This is actually a great post. I’ve struggled with this and it feels like all those tiling window managers are for power users. They’re a pain to customize and 0 intuitive (at lest for me). I share your question!
It is like vim or Emacs that one forgets or tends to forget key bindings and features that one does not use quite frequently. This has nothing to do with intelligence. It is just that the brain forgets stuff it doesn’t see as relevant (and different brains work differently, here).
I like paperwm or niri
I dunno about ‘friendly’, but my setup is minimal configuration and about as stable and unchanging as the terminal. Its xmonad with xfce in no-desktop mode. My xmonad configuration is extremely minimal because I mostly don’t care about customization. I set terminal=alacritty and the thickness and color of the outline around the focus window, and that’s it.
Because I have xfce backing me up, I get the benefit of monitor layout, mouse settings, the xfce session logout window, etc etc.
As for using xmonad itself. You’re just going to have to pull up the keyboard reference on your phone until you can get around ok, there’s no help and no explanation. When you boot into it you get a blank screen lol.
For launching programs, you windows-p and you get the dmenu program launcher at the top of the screen. Type the first few letters of whatever program and hit enter.
keyboard first but mouse available
Sway works really well with mod+drag, but the configuration is nearly the same as i3. Plasma’s new tiling features are really good, but unfortunately mousse driven.
I’d check out the COSMIC beta, might be a good middle ground.
