Everything you're describing in this reply just exhausts the hell out of my brain. You're describing an incredibly large amount of cognitive load you hold in your head all the time about where things are and what they mean and how much of them are visible.

Tiling WM are largely about just not thinking that much about windows at all. They're visible or they're not, they occupy precise areas on your screen, and moving them around is easy and simple and they don't scatter to the 4 winds when you plug your laptop into an external monitor and then unplug it again.

Every time I have to go use a computer with overlapping windows I suddenly find myself thinking about where things are about 10 times as much and it's frustrating and tiring.

I'm the same way. I've tried the various tiling WMs over the years. To me the ideal is just letting me manage the windows myself, and then if you give me some keybindings to snap a window into a certain half or quadrant of the screen then life is real good.

I think it's purely based on you workflow. I'm a "maximizer," 99% of the time things are maximized on my desktop. A second tile (browser) is usually extremely temporary. Other stuff goes to other desktops.

So I general, my layout is highly consistent: just one tile.

For what it's worth, hiding the unimportant details in a web page can also be accomplished by zoom/scroll - but that's definitely not to say your approach is wrong. Different things for different people.

Sway supports both tiling and floating windows and you can define the rules and defaults as you wish. For example a browser window tiled with an editor and a media player floating on top.

You could have one virtual desktop that defaults to tiling and another to floating. With a keyboard shortcut you can toggle a window between the two states.

I was aware of tiling window managers for a decade before I switched from Gnome to Sway. Now I don’t want to go back.

Tiling may seem chaotic, but with Sway you are in the driver’s seat, deciding where each window goes and whether it’s floating or not. There is also interactive window resizing with the mouse and as well as moving windows with the mouse via drag and drop.

> really get the appeal of tiling window managers.

There might be "levels" of appeal and value... I too a few years ago moved to i3. The "tiling" nature is not where I got the most value from. I got it from have "multiple dedicated virtual workspaces(vdesktops)". With the ability to switch to them fast.

Example:

1) Terminal

2) Browser

3) Browser-2

4) Code (VStudio)

5) Code-2 (VStudio)

6) Files (File manager)

7) Gimp

8) Geany (Text Editor)

9) Empty

10)Empty

Just "knowing" how to "instantly" go from Code to a Browser or Text Editor has giving me A LOT of productivity. I'd say more so than any "tiling feature"

I think it's related to the way people organize. I also like to have edges (maybe a few log lines) and corners of windows peeking alongside the edges that are small reminders of their existence. What others consider 'clutter' is 'context' to me. My physical desk area looks much the same--but worse with different layers for other projects.

What I really don't like is the swipe-the-entire-full-screen to an entirely new context when working on another part of the same thing.

> I must be one of the very few "hackerish" minded people that does not really get the appeal of tiling window managers

Are we very few, or just non vocal?

I maximize the windows I work on. When I need to see two things on a screen, my window manager's ability to place windows side by side using the mouse or keyboard shortcuts is more than enough. I usually disable compositing to make shadows disappear when I do this, they are distracting.

Kwin (like more window managers I think) can place windows side by side (left - right or top - bottom), or one window on each corner of the screen. I can't imagine needing to see more than 4 windows at the same time. Seeing three / four windows is already more than distracting enough for me. My brain is too small for that. They wouldn't hold enough information anyway since I zoom text quite a bit, so I can be far from my screen and watch it for long hours without tiring my eyes.

When I notice colleagues tiling their terminal sessions with Terminator I feel claustrophobic. Konsole offers this now, but I've been sticking with tabs so far.

Disclaimer: I am the author.

For Windows 10+ I made Stack WM: https://losttech.software/stack.html

I works differently from i3: you predefine screen zones (possibly overlapping), and then just move your windows between them with keyboard shortcuts or middle mouse button.

IMHO, covers the problems you mentioned. You can have:

- multiple windows in one zone with normal Z ordering

- an improvised taskbar for any zone or a group of zones

- zones that stack windows vertically or horizontally or tile them in a fixed grid

- zones that dynamically adjust size depending on contents

- windows of certain app opening directly into a certain zone

- floating windows

- widgets (the easiest one is simply showing text from a URL with XQuery or JSON parser)

- customize the hell out of it with WPF

It is now one of a few things holding me back on Windows: until I have it or something else very similar running on Linux, I have no replacement to manage my 3 screens the way I like it.

It's not just you. I'd written my own Bash replacement shell and use it daily so I'm not some Linux n00b and I've never got on with tiling VMs. I started to think that maybe the issue is just that I don't like existing tiling WMs, so I started to write my own. After about 2 days of coding I realized that the issue wasn't that other tiling WMs suck, the issue was me: I just prefer floating windows which I can snap via drag and dropping when I want tiling. In fact Kwin is already my perfect WM.

I had seen all these screenshots and work colleagues using i3, Awesome, dwm and such like and looking ultra cool (from a nerdy point of view) and fooled myself into thinking this is what I should be doing too without realizing that I was already happy and productive without them.

I was going to say the same thing. I set things up a particular way with an eye to easily clicking on partially hidden windows, and I usually have specific empty areas on each virtual desktop in the same place because you can place the cursor over the background and use the scroll wheel to change virtual desktops. Each desktop has it's own layout, but they all respect that one area is to be blank so I can easily put my mouse there and rotate between the desktops. It's silly, but it's incredibly useful.

But everyone is different, which is why I go for configurable over programs that expect you to work a particular way. KDE is very good about this.

I think it is people who use their laptop display exclusively (or nearly so). On small laptop displays tiling windows is nice and helps maximize the use of the display. I use the tiling features of mine WM a lot more when using my laptop display, but I still very much prefer 'floating' windows when using a large, external monitor.

I think once you get used to a tiling window manager, like force yourself to use it for over a couple weeks, it's very difficult to go back. Somewhat similar to vim.

Personally, I have 2-3 external 32" 4k monitors and I want to maximize the real estate that's used, tiling wm (specifically i3 in this case) makes it very easy to move windows around, to switch between different screens, to move screens between different monitors quickly. Dragging a mouse across that relatively high screen real estate is a huge pita without i3.

Heh, i feel like maybe hardware constraints also play a role here.

For example, right now i have 4 1080p monitors connected to my computer. I've never really needed anything more than the ability to snap windows to either side of the monitors (or bottom/top for vertical ones) or make them full screen.

With a higher resolution monitor (or an ultra widescreen one) i suspect that it would rapidly change and i'd need to look into either more advanced snapping setups (e.g. AquaSnap or PowerToys FancyZones on Windows, or the Linux equivalent, though even XFCE is pretty flexible out of the box there).

That said, on a laptop i probably wouldn't even try doing that and in many cases the software where i would actually want some sort of tiling already has it baked in - SSH clients like MobaXTerm (though Remmina is also nice on *nix) or all of JetBrains products. Tiling OS windows with smaller sizes feels rather inefficient, because many OSes out there waste space immensely with menus and other always visible items.

But hey, i'd argue that my current setup only has manageable cognitive load because i use overlapping windows managers as "optionally tileable" and due to the amount of monitors have a maximum of 8 open windows without any overlapping. Someone might achieve the same with a single (albeit larger) monitor and a proper tiling manager.

I’m the same. Neovim fills the center of my screen. The web application I’m working on sits behind it, with enough exposed that I can see if my changes are working / breaking, and with another terminal partially revealed showing any build errors. Works well for me. I never liked the layout that WMs picked, because they always force me to look to one side or the other (on a 4K and 5k monitor). Maybe if I was solely running on a 13 inch laptop, a tiling WM would make sense.

for me, a good in-between is using the "super + left click & drag" to move windows around and "super + right click and drag" to resize a window. they allow you to move or resize when you cursor is anywhere in the current window instead of only at the edges. it makes it really quick to perform and can be done it of the corner of you eye.

setting a window to always-on-top with a hotkey is another useful one

I half agree. I used the tiling window manager i3 for about a year, then gnome for the past two years. I really do like to move windows around and arrange them, it feels sort of tactile. I like the simple extensibility of i3 - even as a novice programmer it was possible for me to add new features and even build my own custom python bindings to add more nuanced controls. After a while i3 did become a sort of second brain and it felt like I could keep various domains of life separate very effectively when I was going to school reading and writing a lot, working part time at a job that required lots of terminal windows, and doing my leisure computing all on the same machine. Life has changed and I no longer have a need for balancing all that stuff at once and my window management needs are simpler, a handful of browser windows mostly.

When things get complex gnome is only about 50% as good as I need it to be to manage many things going on at once, though. Alt-tab application switching is a trash paradigm that is terrible no matter the OS.

There’s nothing there a tiling WM cannot do. I have only tried i3 so I can speak only about that. But I’d assume most others are similar.

1) Tiling WMs make Workspaces incredibly easy to access. Super + # is usually enough to get you to a specific workspace and you can easily have 10 of those. So if you are monitoring stuff constantly, it’s easy enough to tile them all in a workspace and gain almost immediate access and come right back to your primary workflow without disrupting much.

2) If you want constant visibility to a small section of a webpage, for example, you can trivially tile it and resize it to be extremely narrow/high on your current workspace, and scroll to ensure the party you want to be visible is visible.

And you can do all of this with a keyboard probably a lot faster than you can with a mouse.

And the tiling WM ensures you’re using up all the space in the screen without you doing anything (as you make the “background” window smaller, the “foreground” window grows).

3) Finally, you can always pop out 1 or more floating windows as well.

I think tiling is better, but to each their own. And tiling WMs don't mean everything is constantly changing.

I think you have a good point about the sidebars of webpages. A lot of webpages don't cope very well with being put in a narrow window like documentation beside a code editor. A lot of cruft, padding, menubars etc tend to take up unmoveable space. It would be nice if we could pan and zoom that kind of stuff out of the way.

But I personally use something in the middle. I have 9 virtual desktops (mapped directly to the numpad on my keyboard using KDE's shortcuts) with some static tiled configurations of the apps I use daily. This way I can quickly check an IM that comes in and snap back to my work stuff in an instant.

But like I said, whatever works for you! I don't think it's a matter of one size fits all.

The only thing I really miss about KDE is having virtual desktops switchable per monitor, not as a whole set of all monitors together :(

My issue is mostly with the half-screen vertical split (two side by side panes). Half a monitor is not enough for me to feel comfortable in an editor, so I'd split it 2/3 or even 3/4, but the remaining 1/3 or 1/4 are not wide enough to hold let's say terminals, and using a horizontal split to get the full width for terminals also steals a lot of height from the editor, while full width in terminals is usually not desired, it's between 1/2 and full width what my terminals should be.

So I prefer to alt-tab cycle. Even though I know that this is an extra effort, at least I can size the windows so that they contain the optimal amount of information.

I do use tools which help me with sizing and positioning of windows.

I sometimes keep 2 or three windows 'tiled' on a 34" monitor, but on anything smaller I tend to use 1 or perhaps 2 windows (like you, often with some overlap).

Perhaps eyesight is important here? I'm short sighted but find wearing glasses when reading a monitor gives me eye strain, so just keep a distance from my monitor where I can read without my glasses (about 1m). To tile windows in a way that is useful I'd need to have much smaller fonts, and I wouldn't be able to read.

I can sort of see what you’re saying, but the cognitive management of what you describe sounds like a huge pain. I use PaperWM and it’s awesome. It just gets out of my way and let’s me manage tons of apps and windows with ease and 0 manual window management. The sliding window tiling approach is also much better imo than that of i3 style, especially on large/widescreen monitors.

As an aside, it’s interesting to me that it’s predominantly OS X users that “don’t see the point in tiling WMs”.

interesting how people are so different in what makes them productive. Your setup sounds like an organized chaos. Like my living room which has things cluttered here or there but is not actually filthy. But when it comes to my WM and technology in general I am so swamped by information that it's an ongoing struggle not having my attention hijacked.

Most of the time I'm in a single full-screen window unless I need to context switch. Some exceptions would be working on a pdf where the markdown is edited in one window and the pdf is to the right (auto-reloading when I save the markdown).

Other exceptions are running a terminal right next to my browser because I need to enter a few commands (installation instructions etc).

I used dwm, switched to i3 then stuck with sway. What I love about it is my limited screen real-estate (laptop) isn't wasted. I don't have an external monitor because I move a lot. My colleagues can't imagine working productively just on a laptop. It's perfect for me.

TBH, it feels like so many "hackerish" people spend so muck time dinking around with their environment they don't get much else done. I used to be that way too when I first started using Linux back in the 90s, but nowadays I mostly run with whatever the defaults are and concentrate on my work.

I must be one of the few that doesn't favor tiling as well. Kinda. My setup is unusual. Allow me two paragraphs to describe it and then why tiling wouldn't work for me.

I usually have 3 windows open at a given time, either a terminal/IM/notes program at the bottom right corner, vlc/deadbeef/copyq/scrcpy at the top right corner, and everything else is the main program I'm working with (2/3rds of the screen width, 100% of height, so stuff like Firefox, Krusader, vscode, Godot, Blender/Krita/GIMP/Inkscape, Audacity, qemu/Virtualbox, etc). I use 3 hotkeys to put a window into one of those 3 spots, via wmctrl, everything else is floating. If things get messy (like if I need a few virtual machines and seeing their contents all at once) I use virtual desktops. I also assigned hotkeys that either open or focus specific programs (like meta+X to focus Konsole or launch it if it doesn't exist, meta+E for Krusader...) so I can quickly switch to them even if they are at the bottom of the stack or aren't opened yet. Got all sorts of custom launchers, clipboard processing and a lot more functions available to key combinations I can do with my left hand only (it's the "alt+tab" hand so I extended it to all important shortcuts). The layout is a standard Windows style bottom panel (Used to have an Unity-style left sidebar but that gave me whiplash when using other computers) full of info/alert plasmoids, including custom ones. All support scripts are fairly universal and mostly work in other desktops, but KDE has nice configuration options to automate window settings, so it works better with it. Also got custom themes but I have no idea how to port them out of KDE. So KDE it is.

Anyway with the description out of the way, tiling might work fine if all you work with is terminals, a browser and other text sources, but for that I'd rather just have tmux managing the important stuff and extra Konsole tabs for the minor operations (or to passively display output of updates in a new self-destructing tab so it gets rid of itself if I forget to close after seeing the output). Because I work with many visual tools that need plenty of space (and don't like sudden resizing) the tiling workflow just can't work for me, anyway. I can see why some would prefer it, though. As I said my use case is unusual. (Yeah I know artists would rather use Windows or Macs but my job requires Linux. My creative things are a hobby, but I wanted to have my cake and eat it. KDE has enough flexibility to let me hack it into submission, so it's not bad at all.)

I think my ideal WM would me split the screen up regions, then I populate the regions with a bunch of apps. Where as in tiling WMs all your windows need to be visible.

no you are not the only one. Don't even get me started on binary space partitioning, don't these people even stop for a moment and think what the point is.

Setting KDEWM to something other than KWin no longer works in Fedora as of 35 (and other "leading edge" Plasma distros like OpenSUSE are quickly approaching this turning point as well). There are several spots in the Plasma code base that KWin is hard coded. Those distros that still allow functional KDEWM only do so because their version of Plasma is either not yet new enough to be affected, or they have deliberately held back parts of Plasma (which means at some point they'll have it give in as well).

    [Unit]
    Description=KDE Window Manager
    #Wants=plasma-kcminit.service
    PartOf=graphical-session.target

    [Service]
    ExecStart=/usr/bin/i3
    BusName=org.kde.KWin
    Slice=app.slice
    Restart=on-failure

Hmm, with layer-shell, you can run some parts from other DEs under a given wayland compositor. I'm not sure what parts support the protocol, but I'm fairly sure you can run krunner, and probably the KDE status bar under sway. I think you can also run xfce's equivalents.

I don't see why all of that couldn't be integrated in nice, modular packages and sets of configuration. Some say that wayland made everything more monolithic. If anything, I think it helped make everything more modular by forcing to specify the interfaces into wayland protocols.

Now, of course some DE prefer using private interfaces instead of proper protocols...

You may want to have a look at Bismuth https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth . It's the successor to Khronkite.

I can second the Khronkite suggestion. It's extremely flexible.

On i3 there is autorandr which does something similar, but of course i3 being i3 you have to configure the outputs manually with xrandr the first time.

I believe one of the best explanations for the power of tiling WMs is "Tags are not workspaces"¹. It describes that beyond your way of working there is a parallel way which exists with no extra work.

I think this is also true for different layouts. You can happily work with simple equal size window layouts, but you can also have per-project or per-app layouts should you wish.

The software grows naturally with you, or if you prefer the other functionality just stays out of your way.

¹ https://github.com/w0ng/wongdev.com/blob/master/content/dwm-...

Not using a tiling WM, but especially on small notebooks I'm so desperate for compact decorations and a global Mac-like menu that I've even prolonged life of my old XPS 13 w/ Ubuntu 16.04 using Ubuntu Advantage/extended security maintenance (their old gnome2-based desktop with Unity). At least there's some hope using KDE Plasma eg. [1].

[1]: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/plasma-look-like-ubuntu-...

I've been using KDE since 2.7 and I agree that, at least initially, 4 was awful, but primarily it was awful for the exact reasons Gnome was and is awful - they took away all the powerful functionality. They Apple-ified it.

After a few point revisions it was almost back to it's former glory. 5/plasma is basically back to the power of 3.0, but I still miss Konqueror.