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.)
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.
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.
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, 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.
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
With your constraints, it’s probably going to be Sway. Bit more simplified than i3, same level of customization, and works with Wayland.
Sway or Hyprland for compositor, Waybar for status bar, fuzzel for app launcher, swaync for notifications, wleave for logout menu.
Everything should work across Hyprland and Sway except for Waybar worskpaces, you need a different configuration for them.
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.
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!
I like paperwm or niri
