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.
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.
I’m loving hyperland both on my desktop and laptop.
+1 for niri. Avoid hyprland, dev is a cunt
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
Niri
That’s scrolling (not tiling) but yes.
Niri is a scrolling tiler. You do not even have to scroll if you really don’t want to.
With your constraints, it’s probably going to be Sway. Bit more simplified than i3, same level of customization, and works with Wayland.
I use KDE with Krohnkite.
E.g. I have my cake and eat it, as windows can get dragged around if I want. Anything weird is just windowed like normal KDE.
Works with mice, and works good OOTB!
I do KDE with Karousel, which is similar to Niri I think.
Yeah, I also recommend this. Particularly with laptops, it’s good to have a full-fledged desktop environment, since you’re more likely to need WiFi, power management, easy display configuration etc…
And KDE’s RAM usage is very reasonable these days, especially if you opt out of some of the bells and whistles.
It was quite good for a while but I feel like it has crept up again. It is over 1.5G at start for me these days.
It used to be under a gig.
It makes a difference when you only have 8G on a laptop.
Look up RAM usage in btop, sort processes by memory usage. A lot it is random services you can disable in the system setting or uninstall with a package manager.
And yeah… it even matters on a higher RAM setup. Sometimes I have most of mine filled with a background thing, and 1GB vs 2 or 3 can make a big difference.
Agreed. That does not change what I said though.
For me, “baloo” is the worst offender.
Also, great to see another btop fan. I use it a lot.
Baloo can be disabled, it’s just the background search indexer. So can kaccess (the accessibility service) and kde wallet (the secrets manager).
A lot of the widgets, effects and stuff take up RAM too.
Yeah, shout out to Krohnkite - really solid stuff. The shortcuts for all it’s actions have become second nature now, amazing how I use the mouse so much less to get windows where and how I want them in a second
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.
Use Windows key instead of Alt. Alt is used by some applications for some actions.
I like paperwm or niri
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.
I dunno about ‘friendly’, but my setup is minimal configuration and about as stable and unchanging as the terminal. Its xmonad with xfce in no-desktop mode. My xmonad configuration is extremely minimal because I mostly don’t care about customization. I set terminal=alacritty and the thickness and color of the outline around the focus window, and that’s it.
Because I have xfce backing me up, I get the benefit of monitor layout, mouse settings, the xfce session logout window, etc etc.
As for using xmonad itself. You’re just going to have to pull up the keyboard reference on your phone until you can get around ok, there’s no help and no explanation. When you boot into it you get a blank screen lol.
For launching programs, you windows-p and you get the dmenu program launcher at the top of the screen. Type the first few letters of whatever program and hit enter.
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”.
x11 or wayland - as you like
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.
