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k__

Is there a good tiling manager for heavy mouse users?

I tried i3 and found the basic concept nice, but it required keyboard shortcuts en masse.

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Change the shortcuts. You can even have mouse clicks be an event. https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/558

https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#keybindings

I find it funny that so many little paper cuts that can be fixed in less then 30 minutes makes people move in tiled window managers.

i3 greatest strength is its ease of configuration compared to most other twm.

Nice to know.

Some visual alternative, like the Windows 8 start menu, to choose apps would be nice on a mouse button.

I like the command menu, when I'm programming, but often I just want to click some icons and be done with it.

you can run any app launcer. Launchy is on my system but 99% of the time I just use dmenu.

https://www.slant.co/topics/3945/~linux-app-launchers

Speaking as a user of XMonad for a few years now, I think the way tiled window managers tend to present more as toolkits for assembling your own tiled window manager rather than one that's just ready-to-go for everyone is as much a disadvantage as it is an advantage. (Yes, they all have default configurations of course, but you are generally expected to customize.) When people occasionally ask me about it, I tend to advise people to pick their tiled window manager less on the putative features and more by what programming language that it is implemented in that they are comfortable in. Now, if you're fluent in one of the languages in question, that's awesome, but it does raise the bar for a lot of people.

You don't have to be an "expert" in Haskell to use XMonad, but it sure doesn't hurt if you want to do some heavier-duty customizations, like use modules that aren't even nominally a part of XMonad.

You seem to know XMonad well, so I'll ask a question. Does it support manual tiling and application tabs yet? I couldn't use it because it felt too basic to me last time I checked it.

I'm pretty sure the core XMonad doesn't, but the core XMonad doesn't do a lot of things, really. If you Google "xmonad tabs", I get http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Layout-T... I have no idea if it will do what you want because I've never used it. That's in xmonad-contrib.

I don't know what you mean by "manual tiling", so I can't say if it's supported. I know I do some manual things but most of my manual things are out of the tiling context entirely.

By manual tiling I mean not having a reduced hardcoded number of layouts, but being able to split every "container" horizontally and vertically, moving and resizing windows freely (ideally using mouse like ion3 did).

There is a BSP based layout[1] in xmonad-contrib. You can resize it using the mouse or the keyboard (with appropriate configuration).

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/xmonad-contrib-0.13/docs...

While i3 does not (AFAIK) support mouse resizing, it does everything else you've mentioned out of the box: split containers horizontally/vertically; supports stacked and tabbed layouts; and with a few config lines, resize both floatable and fixed (i.e. part of stack/tab group) containers.

Yes, I know, I tried it, it has some ideas that ion3 had before, but I still find it lot less flexible than ion3. Though in this case I was asking specifically about XMonad.

Fair enough, ion3 sounds quite interesting, unfortunate that development stopped.

As for XMonad, like Awesome WM, you can probably customize things however you see fit. Just need to know Haskell/Lua and the WM well enough to do so, which may be less than obvious for most.

There is a maintained fork called notion https://github.com/raboof/notion/

It's not heavily developed, but plenty stable. (actually I have a WIP PR open adding icon support)

ion3 (these days that means "notion") is probably the most scriptable WM ever. We're actually using it to implement a prototype of a new WM.

That is true. I was using it heavily when I was using Linux.

With i3 you don't need a language. The configuration is a simple text file. That is why i3 has been my Tiled Window Manger for 4 years now.

> Configuring i3

This is where the real fun begins ;-). Most things are very dependent on your ideal working environment so we can’t make reasonable defaults for them.

While not using a programming language for the configuration, i3 stays quite flexible in regards to the things you usually want your window manager to do.

http://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#configuring

A text file, yes, "simple", well, no, I wouldn't say so. It's not i3's fault; I'd say that comes pretty close to exposing the essential complexity without much accidental complexity. (Translating back out of architecture-astronaut-speak, that's pretty high praise.) But there's a lot of essential complexity. If I plot the complexity of a non-Haskell expert's .xmonad file, an i3 file, and just using stock Ubuntu Gnome, .xmonad and i3 end up pretty much next to each other from the perspective of the Gnome user.

That is a Strawman Argument. What person wants a tiled window manager and not customize it? They want a keyboard driven ui without the ability to change the defaults (Which are some of the best defaults ever)

It is like saying Notepad is simple and Visual Studio Code is complex because it has a plain text json file for customization. They are different tools. For the tool visual studio is much easier then say VIM.

So is i3 MUCH easier to configure then XMond and Awesome.

I use and love Notion (formally ion3), and while it is still keyboard heavy, the mouse can play a big role as well.

I don't think there's a tiling wm that puts mouse first. I think years ago there was some work on KDE to add some tiling behaviour, but I don't know if it was merged and buried in settings somewhere, or it was a plugin, or a patch. I only remember some demonstration video from years ago.

I'm pretty sure there's also Openbox setup with tiling behavior.

I use dwm with some patches, and some customizations that allow for more mouse use.

For instance mouse wheel on the tagbar cycles through tags, mouse wheel on window title cycles through windows, middle click on window title makes currently selected window master, control + mouse wheel on the window title pushes selected window around, mouse wheel on status text increases or decreases sound volume, middle click on status text kills selected window, ctrl + mouse-wheel-up sends selected window to that particular tag, etc etc etc...

So yeah, it's doable in dwm. It's not "mouse first" but most used actions are also doable with mouse, in addition to the keyboard.

It's not too hard, spend an afternoon, or two and you can get it working that way.

> I don't think there's a tiling wm that puts mouse first.

Oberon OS did it.

XMonad isn't too bad for mouse users but I wouldn't say there are any tiling WM that focus on using the mouse.

Yes, back when I used Xmonad I also used the mouse a lot. You can use Super+Left mouse button to move windows around and Super+Right mouse button to resize windows.

Oberon OS and its derivatives.

Clickable workspaces with XMobar and xdotool makes XMonad a tiny bit more mouse friendly.

https://arch-ed.dk/xmobar-clickable-workspaces

I found Awesome slightly more mouse friendly than i3, but I still wouldn't go with it if you're not willing to use the keyboard a lot.

I have a friend who used Awesome on a tablet, so it's clearly feasible.

Now that's something I'd be interesting in seeing, because I can't even imagine how that would work.

Can't be that much different from using Windows 10 in tablet mode, or any random Android tablet.

plug: https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo

It's a hybrid WM with first class support for normal floating windows (the default) and first class support for tiling. However, it's also designed for multiple monitors and therefore breaks a couple chosen EWMH standards, so your favorite pagers may not work in a multiple monitor setup.

There is one - ion3, but it's no longer developed.

There's an maintained "official" fork: https://github.com/raboof/notion/

It's not strictly tiling, but 9wm, based on Plan9's rio window manager, is a no frills, mouse oriented, window manager for X.

> Is there a good tiling manager for heavy mouse users?

The initial version of Oberon OS and the System 3 successor, but they are dead now.

Bluetile seems to be unmaintained now, but it was an XMonad-based WM that had lots of mouse support.

wmii

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