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 used to use a small laptop like yours. Now the smallest one is a spacious 13” so it doesn’t feel quite so constrained.
I ended up on lxqt with the bar on the left hand side and a bunch of virtual desktops. It can do everything you’re asking for and my use is keyboard first. Give it a shot, it’s good.
I like lxqt. What keyboard actions are you using and how did you configure them? On windows I do super+left or right to move windows.
I have it set up the same as the default macos shortcuts for desktops.
There’s two different configurations for keys, the window manager and lxqt itself. I’m using x instead of Wayland so my key config is split between xfwm the window manager and lxqt.