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Comment by williamdclt | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of tiling window managers but never got the use for it.

99% of my time is spent between my browser, my IDE and my terminal. A half-size browser is painful to work with, I need it full screen. Same for IDE. Same for terminal, I do need multiple terminals but I want them together.

I also have another workspace for chat stuff (browser with whatsapp, slack, messenger) and another for random apps (spotify mostly)

So I end up having cmd-tab set up to switch between browser and IDE (don't even get me started on the default macOS behaviour) and have a drop-down terminal mapped to shift-space, so I'm always one keystroke away from the app I want to use. For the rare case I use another app (some excel file containing data), I can afford the manual window switch.

And for the tiling terminal, tmux is my friend. Also allows me to see the same set of terminals between workspaces (multiple terminal windows on the same tmux session)

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I've got all my consoles set up to only open in workspace #1, my text editors open in workspace #2, my work browser in workspace #3, and my distractions browser & slack open in workspace #9. All of these things are a keystroke away. Within each of those workspaces, I am one keystroke away from: 1) tiling all windows to see them at once, or 2) Make them all full screen and flip between them with the equivalent of alt-tab.

None of this requires the mouse and so it all quickly becomes muscle memory. I don't really have to search for anything because it's automatically managed into neat piles within their own workspaces.

I also effectively get 10 times the desktop real-estate compared with a non-tiling window manager, because I'm more likely to use all 10 workspaces when switching between them is a matter of pressing command+{workspace number}.

Personally for the most part I only have one application per workspace, and switch workspaces frequently. I often have several terminals on one workspace, though. I don't regularly use any GUI applications other than qutebrowser (web browser) and alacritty (terminal emulator).

how do you do password management? I setup Sway/qutebrowser last week and love it, but the lack of password management extensions was crippling. I reverted to Firefox + Vimium, which has been a subpar experience to qutebrowser.

from what I understand the team on qutebrowser is actively working on an API for addons, but in the meantime it's a nonstarter for me.

thank you for your contributions, by the way.

https://www.passwordstore.org/

I keep a keepassxc open in the scratchpad, available with one keystroke on any desktop when I need it.

Workflow:

- site needs a login

- mod+- to get keepassxc to the front

- ctrl+f for search, typing the first letters of the service

- ctrl+c to copy the password

I'm still using i3 but I guess it should work with Sway. Use the userscript related to your preferred password manager. Lastpass, keypass and pass are supported.

Something like:

config.bind('key', 'spawn --userscript qute-pass')

https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/tree/master/misc/...

Would you recommend alacritty at this point? I've been mostly happy with kitty lately, but I haven't tried alacritty since its very early days.

I'm interested too. I've been looking and looking but can't seem to find a good terminal on mac... There's plenty on Linux (tilda did the job I asked perfectly) but none on macos

Yeah, it's pretty decent.

I use full-screen windows similarly and it drives me crazy that MacOS has "spaces", which would be perfect for this, except for the stupid animation that MacOS insists on playing every time you switch between spaces, and which can't be turned off.

This makes them pretty much useless if you switch hundreds of times a day.

The utility of a window manager like sway is stunted by many applications implementing their own window management facilities. Sway doesn't only support tiling windows, it also supports displaying multiple windows as a single window with a tab bar instead of a titlebar (or a similar mode with a vertically arranged tab bar). Any application that insists you use its built-in tab functionality is competing with sway over who gets to do window management, and it creates an awkward nested UI.

Sway is at its best when you take back control over window management from your applications and give it to your window manager. Firefox tabs are great, but they only manage Firefox windows. Tmux is great, but it only lets you tile terminals. Vim is great but it only lets you tile editors. This paradigm forces you to arrange your windows according to their type, rather than whatever layout makes sense for your workflow.

Here's a layout I often use:

I dedicate a workspace to writing a piece of software. I split it vertically and keep my editors for the files I'm actively working on on the right split and reference material on the left.

That means that my right split is mostly editor windows, but my left split is very heterogeneous. Sometimes I want to use a documentation web page for reference. Sometimes I want to reference a manpage in a terminal window. Or a repl. Or an editor window displaying a file in (conceptually) read-only mode. I keep all these sorts of windows in the same row of tabs — impossible in the conventional window management paradigm.

You need to choose software that lends itself well to this paradigm. Some software is more amenable, and some less.

Here are my recommendations:

Firefox with my webextension: https://github.com/adrusi/notable

Alacritty or st for the terminal

Kakoune for the editor (Vim probably can't be made to work, since it doesn't use a proper client/server model. Emacs doesn't work out of the box, but I'm sure it could be made to work. Atom and vscode conflate the concept of a window with the concept of a project too thoroughly for me to hold out any hope that they can be adapted easily. Kakoune works out of the box.)

Pidgin for instant messaging (works well for IRC and Facebook messages; has a config option to open new chats as new windows instead of tabs)

Zathura for viewing PDFs

Mpv for video and audio

I use i3 in tabbed mode, I like it more for the easy config, less memory hogging, and the ability to hit shift+mod+3 and move the current window to workspace 3 on my 3rd screen. or mod+left to move a tab left/right. etc... Also have everything auto-open/placed in the right window on startup is nice as well.

For me, even with very few windows open (but more than 2) a tiling window manager is superior because of the keyboard-driven directional navigation (Super+[hjkl]) instead of the unidirectional Cmd+Tab.

Openbox has the same type of directional window navigation based on the relative positions of the floating windows

i3/Sway has workspaces and tabs which would still support this workflow and allow it to scale to more apps. It is particularly good with multiple monitors. You don't have to tile the windows!

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