edit: and as fellow niri user, I recommend people try it. I think it's one of the easiest tiling WMs to get into, it feels very natural within minutes.

Important long lived ones would be on workspaces where I could jump to them by number. I would have sound mixer and music on 1, mail and instant messaging on 2, browser on 3, then dev stuff or admin tasks etc on 4+. These would stretch horizontally, of course.

What I found was the “+” in “4+” could often be quite a lot of windows. I might have to reference some PDF in order to fill out a form in another PDF, and open a new browser window to manage some other reference document, and screenshots for the final draft, and terminals for taking temporary notes, maybe an image editor to trim screenshots, etc.*

With niri, I still have the “1234” layout but these are now rows with keyboard shortcuts. The ad hoc windows that get pushed onto and popped off my mental context stack grow rightwards… as a stack!

For me, niri’s brilliance is giving me those two axes. Known topics with keyboard navigation on the vertical axis. Ad-hoc tasks within each topic on a push/pop context stack on the horizontal axis.

*Ironically, these multi-window tasks were always the most mundane! Form filling for a mortgage application, say, or managing a report review for multiple authors. Software engineering — one of the more complicated things one can do on a computer, is all very neatly contained inside an IDE / tmux+vim+sh.

  niri msg action focus-window --id $(niri msg --json windows | jq '.[] | select(.app_id=="foot") | .id')

  1: notes
  2: browser
  3: code
  4: mail
  5 onward: dynamic or named on the fly

As a recent hyprland user it's really useful being able to pick out the features I like and incorporating them into my setup.

That's available in sway/wlroots master with xdg-desktop-portal-wlr master. Will be in next release.

Download and run "picom" (its default configuration is good), or any other compositor. This is the way to get graphical acceleration for regular windows on X11, and fix tearing.

> Scaling stuff is a total mess, a mess that you can mostly get to work, but you’ll need to set four different environment variables and run a gsettings daemon and set these three properties and add this file to this location and that one to that and modify your Chromium flags and I probably even forgot a couple of steps.

I just modify ~/.Xresources with the "Xft.dpi: 120" for 1.25x scaling. All apps I care about pick this value to scale the UI with (chrome, firefox, telegram, Qt as a whole, etc). Notable exceptions being java apps.

See: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI#X_Resources https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xorg#Setting_DPI_manually

AeroSpace is almost there, it has a few quirks and annoyances and is missing some features but it's close enough that it's now my daily driver for client work requiring being on a Mac.

Highly recommended and hopefully it continues to evolve. Also hoping that the churn in macOS is not going to kill it for some unexpected reason.

As far as Hyprland, I tried it and when I got to a setup that I felt comfortable I realized that I had basically replicated my Sway setup with no added benefits so I just switched back to Sway. I'm not much into ricing anyway. I mostly want the chrome to stay out of my way.

That said, for people unfamiliar with i3/Sway, Hyprland could be a great way of getting into tiling so I'm definitely rooting for them!

AeroSpace tiling window manager finally changed my work day from constant struggle to only occasional struggle with macOS. I use it with sketchybar which is not yet perfect, but it could become quite good and performant with some work on it.

I currently use Gnome on Linux, not a tiling window manager, and I would gladly go with Hyprland, but about a year ago while I was trying it out, it crashed quite a few times so it clearly was not ready for production use back then. Will give it a shot again.

For me it's pure speed at getting to where I need to go. My notes live on workspace 1, my main workspace on 2 and browser on 3, so I'm just a single key combination away from most of what I need. Can still alt+tab if I like.

If that doesn't feel useful to you, then maybe a tiling wm isn't right for you. That's entirely fine.

My wm has an "escape" in that I can define floating desktops, and by default I have one, mostly used for file management, because there are things where I agree it's better to have floating/overlapping windows.

It doesn't really matter if it's a "waste of space" - I have two large monitors, and 10 virtual desktops to spread windows between (I'd add more, but I haven't felt the need). To the point where my setup, by default, centers the window with large margins when I have just one window open on a screen because it's more comfortable (and I'm just one keypress away from fullscreening the app anyway).

Most of the time I use tiling because I like not having to care about the layout beyond those defaults.

But I can also configure specific layouts. E.g. I have desktop dedicated to my todo list, a list of done items, and notes, and it has a fixed layout that ensures those windows are always in the same placement, on the same desktop.

It's quite the opposite.

My laptop has a small 11.1'' screen, so using a traditional desktop with smaller windows is not practical for me. Plus, not having the windows overlap with each other by default gives a more structured workflow.

unrelated to the comment: I wrote this answer 3 times, but the damn process killer on Android kept deleting it so I had to re-write it each time. if I sound mad, it is because I am.

i used to have a setup like this on i3, using i3-msg to query the state

    #!/bin/env bb
    
    (ns switch
      (:require [clojure.java.shell :as sh]
                [babashka.process :refer [pipeline pb shell process]]
                [clojure.string :as str]))
    
    (def workspace-ids
      (-> (pipeline (pb "hyprctl workspaces")
                    (pb "grep 'workspace ID'")
                    (pb "awk '{print $3}'"))
          last
          :out
          slurp
          (str/split #"\n")
          (->> (reduce (fn[acc e]
                         (try (let [ee (Integer/parseInt e)]
                                (conj acc ee))
                              (catch Exception e acc))) [])
               (filter #(and (pos? %)
                             (not= 10 %))))))
    
    
    
    (doseq [w workspace-ids]
      (-> (process (str "hyprctl dispatch moveworkspacetomonitor " w " 1"))
          deref
          :exit
          println))
    
    (process "hyprctl dispatch workspace 8")