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.)
edit: Tried
- cachy+LxQt
- cachy+niri
- AntiX + IceWM
Couldn’t figure out how to remap keys in LxQt. Niri was cool but a bit overwhelming especially on a laptop with just kb+touchpad and it’s easy to back yourself into a corner (window wider than the monitor).
IceWM allows for super+arrows to move windows side by side like Windows. I don’t love it but it works okay. Performance is also a big concern and my idle RAM seems to be around 300M for AntiX vs 700+ for cachy+niri.
I wasn’t crazy about i3. I really like hyprland though. Been using it for about a year now.
I use paperwm i think it pretty much defaults to what you want. the issue i had with i3 and such window managers is that they’re lacking everything else about laptops. Energy mode depending on battery state, or even basic warnings for example. Bluetooth, wifi etc. all need to be set up and maintained by yourself. Which to me became to annoying so I switched to gnome with paperwm and that rolling desktop really is something. I have never looked back.
The easier setup I found is Xfce with WM swapped for BSPWM. You can do every window manipulation with mouse (while Super key pressed).
x11 or wayland - as you like
Honestly? I have more or less the same use case, and I use Gnome or KDE and just use super+left/right to do the half-screen windows, and super+page up/page dn to switch between workspaces for fullscreen windows.
Is is the most optimal TWM experience? No. But is is fast to set up, easily usable, and requires no keyboard shortcut configuration? Yes.
You’ve gotten suggestions for KDE; IME KDE is memory intensive, and while you don’t mention memory, laptops often have less memory than desktops. Your intuition about a proper tiling WM is a good choice.
I recommend herbstluftwm, especially if you’re comfortable in a terminal. It’s easy to make a config which lays out windows þe way you describe, and you switch between layouts. Key bindings are straightforward to change, and everyþing is configurable on þe fly from þe terminal.
For a status bar, I revommend polybar. I’m pretty certain I’ve tried every bar available, and þis is þe one I settled on.
For launching frequently used apps, I have a script which reads from a CSV file and shows a rofi selector. It would be easy to make one which shows all
.desktopapplications on your computer, like a start menu.hlwm has no GUI configuration tool, so “for dummies” is not going to apply.
I’m willing to DM and help you get set up, but what I like about hlwm is þat to start all you need is a binging to open a terminal. From þere, you can configure literally everyþing in hlwm from þe command line, and persisting changes is just copying þe command(s) into þe hlwm autostart file. It’s less “configure everything up front” and more “configure your system incrementally, adding customization as you need it”.
+1 for niri. Avoid hyprland, dev is a cunt
With your constraints, it’s probably going to be Sway. Bit more simplified than i3, same level of customization, and works with Wayland.
niri is great on laptops
+1 for niri. Installed it on my 11" laptop, and it is as if it’s made for that use case
This is actually a great post. I’ve struggled with this and it feels like all those tiling window managers are for power users. They’re a pain to customize and 0 intuitive (at lest for me). I share your question!
It is like vim or Emacs that one forgets or tends to forget key bindings and features that one does not use quite frequently. This has nothing to do with intelligence. It is just that the brain forgets stuff it doesn’t see as relevant (and different brains work differently, here).
Oh yeah, nothing to do with intelligence for sure. I just meant that, for me, since I’ve always used mouse plus a good amount of keyboard shortcuts, was too much to learn. That and the config files (hyprland, hyprpaper, this and that). I’d rather have less options, but be it more “easy” on the learning curve. On my work pc I use a tiling assistant for Gnome (it runs on catchyOS) and I just have a few combinations to tile midscreen or to the corners, and that is enough most of the time. "It is just that the brain forgets stuff it doesn’t see as relevant " that is so true and infuriating now that I’m trying to learn some academic work… pretty irrelevant for me lol
They key is repetition, and this means it can be easier to go “all in” and learn, say, only six or eight keyboard chords from stumpwm than to use Xfce with mouse and i3 and more stuff, because the latter is ultimately more complex and requires more things that need to be memorized.
There is a learning program called Anki which is great for repeating learned stuff, it was made for language learning but I’ve used it also for a job where I had to learn like one hundred three-letter acronyms. It can be very helpful but it won’t help if one does not use the learned stuff.
And that’s why things like PaperWM or niri might be a good compromise on the spectrum between “powerful but complex” and “simple but limited”.
And how much complexity is good for one depends also on the area of application. I use Rust for programming which is complex for sure, but when I have to scan a document, I use “simple-scan” which does exactly one thing, and very well.
I don’t know if i3 can do this too, but in sway you can also move windows using the mouse. Just hit mod+the left mouse button and drag it around. However I usually just go with the Keyboard. Mod+shift+arrow is just faster.
I like paperwm or niri
Use Windows key instead of Alt. Alt is used by some applications for some actions.
GNOME with paperwm extension might be nice for you. Controllable by keyboard and mouse, normal configuration and things like control panel for audio / bluetooth / network , good use of screen estate.
Myself I use stumpwm on a 40 inch 4K screen but that’s because I am very used to the command line and also had vision problems for some time. Most tiling WMs give very little visual feedback and require sigbificant memorization. Which, like using vim, makes predominantly sense for continuous and heavy use.
Niri is absolutely the best tier for a laptop with a smaller screen. It provides all the benefits of tiling without the tiny, cramped windows that tiling tends to result in.
On other tilers, you end up using workspaces for single apps to avoid splitting the screen.
