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) :)
I use Niri. It just feels right to me, having lots of space to stick windows (scroll horizontally, switch workspaces vertically).
It takes some getting used to, but the overview is helpful, and here’s always the window switcher if you “lost” a window. But what really changed the game for me were special “focus-or-spawn” keybindings with
nirius, e.g. when I press Meta+B my browser opens, or if it is already open it is focused.If you only want to use scrolling for some workspaces, you can have a look at Umbriel. It looks really interesting, I haven’t had time to try it out.
Interesting. I haven’t had trouble finding windows so far, but I set up the niri_search_window script from niri_tweaks as mod+tab just in case I need it.
Cool! I’ll take a look at it, thanks!