Hacker News Reader

Comment by Miner49er | Hacker News Reader

Recently been forced to work on Windows, been looking for a tiling windows manager for Windows. I'm used to i3/Sway.

Played with it a bit. It has some good ideas, but hopefully they keep adding features. Some things it's missing (that most or all tiling WMs have):

- Custom keyboard shortcuts

- ability to switch focus quickly with keyboard shortcuts (move to window to right/left, instead of alt-tabbing through all open windows for example)

- virtual desktop keyboard shortcuts to quickly switch to a numbered Virtual Desktop and move windows to them (I have a autohotkey script for this), but would be nice for it to be built-in to this.

- an option to auto-tile when new windows are opened. As it is, it floats new windows, and you have to manually move them into position. This is fairly cumbersome.

View on HN

I've been using bug.n [1] which has all of that except for being able to directly focus a window, instead having to iterate through with next/prev window. But otherwise it has everything I'd expect from a Linux tiling window manager, even coming with a customizable status bar.

It has its quirks and I had to spent some time adding exceptions and the auto resizing it does is certainly not the fastest thing in the world, but I'm more than willing to put up with it for the auto tiling.

On the whole, it's more reminiscent of xmonad than i3, but wasn't too bad to learn since you can bind what ever keys you want to whatever operations.

[1]https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n/

> - virtual desktop keyboard shortcuts to quickly switch to a numbered Virtual Desktop and move windows to them (I have a autohotkey script for this), but would be nice for it to be built-in to this.

You can do this with DexPot (https://www.dexpot.de/?lang=en) and even send windows to a specific virtual desktop. It uses i3's key binds by default.

On Windows you're better off trying to find specific functionality from i3 across different tools.

For example, you can also use http://keypirinha.com/ to launch apps by fuzzy matching. In some ways it's better than d-menu and in other ways it's worse, but it's a decent tool.

And you can also use AutoHotKey to remap and set global hotkeys (as you may do in i3's config).

The only missing thing is actually tiling windows unfortunately.

I am in similar situation. I tried to use WSL with X server at first, but found that the antivirus block the internet usage of WSL until a certain update, but the antivirus was outdated.

At last, I use a similar setup with Autohotkey script. I remap the winkey to some unused key in order to disable default winkey behavior, so that I could use binding like win + 1 for virtual desktop 1, win + shift + 1 to move window to virtual desktop 1, and so on.

It was tough to work on other OS once you get used to tilting manager. It feels backward to manually moving around multiple stacking windows.

Also coming to Windows from an i3 background, I've set up a custom autohotkey script that handles a lot of window management stuff for me on windows 10.

F1 - Run or switch to Outlook

F2 - Run or switch to Firefox

F3 - Run or switch to Emacs

...

F9 - Cycle windows in app

F10 - previous window (alt+tab)

F11 - maximize / restore

F12 - Kill window

It's not tiling, but it's a potent workflow.

For the launch, open of applications I use Win+Position on super bar.

Win+1 Explorer

Win+2 Firefox

Win+...

Man, that saves me from so much alt-tabbing. I was using a custom AutoHotKey script to move between all sorts of Visual Studio solutions and manually opening email/chat/chrome/whatever else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com