I too am in the "it's done, it works well, don't mess with it" camp.
I've tested everything. Xfce, tiling window managers, kde. Eventually I settled on Gnome, but I incorporate few "tiling features". Such as keystroke changing workspaces on one monitor and the second monitor always showing the same few "always on" apps.
I always have my terminal with tmux full screen on workspace 1. My Web browser on no 2. My IDE on 4 and my password manager on 9. Then if I watch a video it's always on 3, if I do graphics work it's always on 5 and so on.
I use ctrl-super-number to switch workspaces. If I need to move current window it's ctrl-shift-super-number.
On a work windows mashine I use the exa t same keys thanks to AutoHotkey software. So I have the exact same work flow on Linux and Windows. The only difference is on Windows workspace 1 is WSL terminal.
Ive been working like this for years. Select copy and paste works fine with left/right mouse button.
I have all my widgets I need showing the temperatures, what my pc and network are doing.
While reading it, I kept wondering why he thinks there hasn't been much innovation in the Linux WM space. And amusingly, tiling managers are one of the shining points of Linux WMs. I can't get a good one to work on Windows or Mac OS the way I can with AwesomeWM. To me, those OS's are quite behind.
Stuff like compiz was first on Linux. Woefully underused - even on Linux!
Enlightenment was amazing in the old days.
> Why would I want to change anything?
You don't need to change anything, but others do! Suppose the world decided tiling WMs were the way to go, and you could no longer run Gnome the way you currently do. Would you be happy?
The ideal is to have more features/capabilities, while not breaking existing users like you and me.
Tiling window managers aren't new though, I went through my tiling phase 25 years ago (Ion). My Mac experience today is not uniformly better than it was 30 years ago and in some ways much worse. It's true that much of the infrastructure is way better now, we have pretty good multilingual support everywhere, protected memory, better color, much better networking, but as someone who often just wants to sit down and grind through the e-mail queue that experience has been getting worse for around a decade.
Tiling window managers predate Linux (and Mac and Windows). Not to diminish the work people are doing to make the desktop better, in general I think on the Linux side things have gotten pretty good, but it's hard to come up with very many widely used substantial UX changes. Comparing to say Windows or Mac drawing an arbitrary line at 1990, networked hypertext, desktop search... What else? The infrastructure underneath is all way more advanced but the overall experience is pretty similar.
Once again, I'm not talking about who invented them. I'm talking about the innovations in tiling managers in Linux WMs. I somehow doubt you'll find something as good as AwesomeWM in pre-Linux WMs.
In AwesomeWM, you don't have workspaces, you have tags. Each tag can have its own window layout. A given window can have multiple tags. As an example, I can have my terminal on tag 1, Firefox on tag 2, Emacs on tag 3. The tags appear like your typical workspaces.
Then I consult Firefox and need to type a command into the terminal. I can quickly assign tag 4 to both Firefox and the terminal. When I click on tag ("workspace" 4), I have both FF and the terminal tiled. If I go back to tag 1, it's just the terminal - or tag 2 and it's just Firefox.
If you want to think in terms of workspaces, it's the equivalent of having your window in multiple workspaces.
But even better: Instead of assigning tags 4 to both of them, I can just say "Let's temporarily combine tags 1, 2 and 3", and I'll have a (transient) view with all 3 windows, tiled. Very handy if I just need to do it for a short period of time - no need to untag 4 from all of them.
This way you can quickly do the "union" and "difference" of different tags as needed - really quickly. Say I've got both FF and Emacs in one tag. Then I need to quickly run a terminal command and copy/paste the output. I just say "Hey, let's do a union with tag 1, run the command, and undo the union."
Once you get used to it, you miss it in any window manager that doesn't have it.
no, you were among that day's lucky 10k when someone told about tiling GUI, and that day was the date it was invented in your mind. and it's not. awesomewm itself is like 20 years old and it was a competitor to other 10 years old tiling WMs at the start of that project.
I don't know what you're reading into my comments to give you the idea that I don't know how old tiling WMs are. I used them in the 90's.
Roark66 · · focus · HN ↗
I've tested everything. Xfce, tiling window managers, kde. Eventually I settled on Gnome, but I incorporate few "tiling features". Such as keystroke changing workspaces on one monitor and the second monitor always showing the same few "always on" apps.
I always have my terminal with tmux full screen on workspace 1. My Web browser on no 2. My IDE on 4 and my password manager on 9. Then if I watch a video it's always on 3, if I do graphics work it's always on 5 and so on.
I use ctrl-super-number to switch workspaces. If I need to move current window it's ctrl-shift-super-number.
On a work windows mashine I use the exa t same keys thanks to AutoHotkey software. So I have the exact same work flow on Linux and Windows. The only difference is on Windows workspace 1 is WSL terminal.
Ive been working like this for years. Select copy and paste works fine with left/right mouse button.
I have all my widgets I need showing the temperatures, what my pc and network are doing.
Why would I want to change anything?
BeetleB · · focus · HN ↗
Stuff like compiz was first on Linux. Woefully underused - even on Linux!
Enlightenment was amazing in the old days.
> Why would I want to change anything?
You don't need to change anything, but others do! Suppose the world decided tiling WMs were the way to go, and you could no longer run Gnome the way you currently do. Would you be happy?
The ideal is to have more features/capabilities, while not breaking existing users like you and me.
hedgehog · · focus · HN ↗
BeetleB · · focus · HN ↗
hedgehog · · focus · HN ↗
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
BeetleB · · focus · HN ↗
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
BeetleB · · focus · HN ↗
Then I consult Firefox and need to type a command into the terminal. I can quickly assign tag 4 to both Firefox and the terminal. When I click on tag ("workspace" 4), I have both FF and the terminal tiled. If I go back to tag 1, it's just the terminal - or tag 2 and it's just Firefox.
If you want to think in terms of workspaces, it's the equivalent of having your window in multiple workspaces.
But even better: Instead of assigning tags 4 to both of them, I can just say "Let's temporarily combine tags 1, 2 and 3", and I'll have a (transient) view with all 3 windows, tiled. Very handy if I just need to do it for a short period of time - no need to untag 4 from all of them.
This way you can quickly do the "union" and "difference" of different tags as needed - really quickly. Say I've got both FF and Emacs in one tag. Then I need to quickly run a terminal command and copy/paste the output. I just say "Hey, let's do a union with tag 1, run the command, and undo the union."
Once you get used to it, you miss it in any window manager that doesn't have it.
numpad0 · · focus · HN ↗
BeetleB · · focus · HN ↗
lsh0 · · focus · HN ↗
Me too! Never moved off of it: <a href="https://notionwm.net/" rel="nofollow">https://notionwm.net/