I’ve been using tiling WMs for some years now (mostly sway, but also tested cosmic a bit). I really love them: you theme workspaces and organize everything into them, and no window is ever hidden, which makes finding them trivial. But the cost of having every window displayed in that workspace is that they start getting way too small when you have a lot of them. This is usually not a big deal, since you can create tabs or just open new generic workspaces.
But what has been bugging me are windows that need to be big, otherwise they are unusable (like gimp, kdenlive, libreoffice, sometimes firefox). Tabbing them in fullscreen messes with the workspace layout, and if you dedicate an entire generic workspace for them, you surely will lose it.
That’s where scrollable WMs enter the scene. They respect window sizes at the cost of their visibility.
niri.gif
NGL, this is not a good idea. It’s easy to lose windows that are off-screen. But what if you only use it sometimes? Think of it as a regular tiling WM, but when you need it, it creates more space off-screen.
To achieve this, I’ve been using Niri with the tilemod script. It helps make Niri behave more like a regular tiling.
tilemod.gif
It’s been a good experience over the last week. My workflow is mostly unchanged, but when I need to work with a window in fullscreen, it’s always a relief that I’m using Niri.
Has anyone else here tried scrollables? I’m in this excitement phase so I want to read more about it (even from people who tried and didn’t like them) :)
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 use it and I like it. For me, I use a second monitor just to keep an app open constantly so I can use my main monitor for the interactive stuff. If I’m feeling fancy I make a second workspace on the second monitor to keep a split screen of my music player and messaging app.
I don’t remember the default way that workspaces are organized with multiple screens, but for me I prefer each screen to have their own workspaces, and I use them sparingly and that works great for me.
From my experience niri works well.
niri dank material shell (dms) is nice for that too. But yeah if you want something super lightweight you may just want to just config base niri yourself.
I have it on my 3:2 laptop that I occasionally plug into my 21:9 monitor and it generally just works; though the trackpad navigation is what really makes it for me.