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.)

  • Gamma@programming.devEnglish
    2·
    3 hours ago

    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.