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.
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.