Workspacer: A tiling window manager for Windows 10 | Hacker News Reader

Workspacer: A tiling window manager for Windows 10

workspacer.org

82 pointslnyan34 comments

As someone who migrated to Windows 10 from macOS, I was very frustrated that I couldn't find a tiling window manager that was intuitive for me as a former user of yabai and bspwm, so I decided to make my own: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/yatta (there is a full animated demo embedded in the readme)

Workspacer was one of the TWMs for W10 that I tried, but ultimately I became very frustrated with the configuration story because of the tight coupling between the TWM and keyboard shortcut configuration.

yatta follows the sockets model of bspwm and yabai, which means that all config can be managed through AutoHotKey (or any other hotkey daemon of your choice) instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, and makes the TWM experience as scriptable as bspwm and yabai without increasing the complexity of the TWM codebase itself.

I've been using this full time for a number of months now, and for anyone used to bspwm or yabai, I would say that it mostly "just works" (it comes with a batteries-included AHK config example) and has a few nice extra features like being able to resize everything by dragging window edges and dragging/dropping windows to switch their positions in the layout tree.

This looks like a really interesting take, in that it doesn't implement an i3 style bar, but rather keeps the native Windows taskbar interface. I'll be giving it a try when a binary release is available. I gave Workspacer a try, and found that it is very slow to switch between workspaces- maybe 500ms. Something I've always wondered is, would it be possible to create an alternative display manager? I know that the Windows display manager is fully isolated, but I'm wondering if it also handles how graphics are drawn, so that it would not be practical to replace with an alternative. With the new Windows Terminal and Windows Subsystem for Linux, I could imagine myself using an alternate display manager, and not even realizing that I'm running the NT kernel...

meta: I highly recommend including at least one screenshot on the homepage.

I'm not sure this would be helpful but you can move around the window with keyboard win + arrow across multiple monitors with Fancyzone too.

Focusing the specific window is different story, though alt-tabbing or win + num might helpful for that.

My ergo keyboard layout is getting centered around ctrl and win mostly these days.. just saying.

Here's an alternative window manager in AutoHotKey. I consider it essential as I use a 4k screen at 100% scale. It's entirely keyboard-shortcut driven. NB: it doesn't support multiple monitors, though it'll work fine for the primary monitor.

https://autohotkey.com/board/topic/79338-simple-window-posit...

Thank you for this! I hacked my own window manager in Autohotkey in a couple of days and this gives me some new ideas

Looks cool, but is there any reason sentences on the website don't begin with capital letters? It is a youth thing?

Maybe some kind of OCD? Same thing with the README and description on Github

That, and "it suites my needs" makes me reluctant to just install and run this software without carefully examining the source code first, and maybe building/running from source myself.

Oh my god. I thought maybe it was just some "quirky" thing on the landing page that the author reckoned they could get away with because every piece of copy is only one sentence, but it's even like that on other pages on the site that have multiple sentences per paragraph (try the "config" link at the top of the page).

No. Do not do this.

why does this stylistic choice triggers such clear-cut rejection? the "use capital letters at the beginning of a sentence" is a pretty useless rule from the point of view of having your reader understand what you write.. the goal of the language is completely met by the webpage.

I can't tell if this post is serious, or a sarcastic demonstration of why omitting capitals at the beginning of sentences is a very bad idea if your goal is to communicate clearly.

I'm far from an expert on these matters but my understanding is that using capital letters to start sentences is done because it helps anchor the reader's place in the text. When capital letters are excluded, it's easier for a person to lose their place while reading. There are other ways this could be accomplished such as returning to the old custom of using two spaces between sentences or making sentence ending punctuation marks larger or heavier, but initial capital letters is the one English has settled on and is almost universally used.

Because periods are very small and a capital letter makes the semantic delineation more distinct, like indenting code does.

Because capital letters are mostly omitted when the writer is in a hurry and doesn't care very much for details, which is insulting to the reader in a context where care and attention is expected.

And if you hadn't thought of those reasons - the fact that everyone else does should be a clue. Chesterton's Fence and all that. Show some humility!

One sentence begins with "i", despite "I" being capitalized in the middle of the prior sentence. It seems to be a deliberate stylistic choice, for whatever reason.

I think it's a youth thing from 10-15 years ago, i.e. people who are ~30 now (e.g. me :) )

I guess we were optimistic in thinking you all would've grown up by now.

Such a gratuitously pretentious take.

I'm 29 and have never even heard of anyone doing this, but I grew in rural Texas so maybe we were just behind the times.

Likely yes.

Gretchen McCulloch has a book called Because Internet which talks about how the internet has changed English. People joined the internet in different waves. Each group of had the challenge of re-inventing writing conventions for the writing that falls outside of the relatively formal academic/business writing taught in highschool.

For the people were using a cellphone with autocorrect was a significant part of their internet usage, uncapitalization became a way to indicate casual tone. Since autocorrect would capitalize for you, it was clear that the lower case letters weren't the result of you being lazy. Instead you were going back to deliberately undo the capitalization of the word.

So yes, it is probably a youth thing and it's done to indicate a casual tone.

[0] - https://gretchenmcculloch.com/book/

It's certainly an informal thing, and in my experience, yes, a youth thing. For me, capitalization/no capitalization is akin to the difference between a formal/informal 'you' in other languages (i.e., German, French). There's nothing wrong with either in the right context. A fun little software toy seems informal enough to me, so I wouldn't question it too much.

I'm not installing an exe from someone who doesn't respect me/his readers enough, or doesn't have enough care to use capital letters.

This is awful.

Stylistic choices and a casual tone are one thing, but nearly everyone who reads English is thrown off by this particular choice. Style should almost never take precedence over forcing your readers to put effort into actually reading.

From the screenshots it looks like it fully replaces the default Windows shell, or are you running it as a full screen app with the Windows task bar hidden?

Does it support multiple monitors? If so what is the experience like?

I've only just tried this out with 3 monitors so I could be doing something wrong. 1 monitor has an i3 style task bar at the top showing workspace numbers (one, two, three, ...). It works like i3 in that you can navigate those workspaces and move windows to them. I still have the win10 task bar at the bottom of the screen. I've stopped using this for now because although it works with multiple monitors, it is not obvious to me how to use the workspace navigation without causing windows to go to unintended monitors (in workspace one, I have 2 apps on far left monitor, workspace three they get moved to far right but are not retiled for that monitor's size.

It could be because I am running a mixture of 4k, 2k, and a normal monitor or I am doing something wrong.

There is another app that I used in the past for my dual monitor setup. It called DisplayFusion. However it is a paid app but worth it. I brought the software through Steam and it is updated regularly.

This app works with combination of monitors with different resolutions. I have it not to show the taskbar in my second monitor and automatically place those apps in specific workplace when i start them up. It works very well.

How does it compare to FancyZones that comes with Windows PowerToys?

It's not the same thing at all, in the sense that this is very much keyboard-driven whereas FancyZones is mouse-driven.

Think of it as XMonad-like, with permanently tiled, auto-arranged windows (see https://workspacer.org/screenshots/) and able to move/rotate windows using keyboard alone.

I use FancyZones a lot and am currently trying to find a Mac analogue - nothing does "drop and place" the same way.

In the meantime, I've switched from Moom to https://github.com/kasper/phoenix and implemented XMonad-like tiling (Amethyst-like) in a couple of hours:

https://gist.github.com/rcarmo/1daccbe9abbbb5c133b7b48d05cc0...

...in comparison, I have yet to build a FancyZones equivalent since mouse handling requires a completely different logic when doing window placement (I have to grab the current window frame, figure out if it matches a predefined zone, etc.).

What I'd really like is something more like i3, sway, or stumpwm and ratpoison. All windows get tiled, and automatically added to your tiling layout, but the tiling is to some extent manual (and everything is keyboard-driven). I used bug.n previously, but the XMonad-style auto-tiling is generally not what I want when I have more than 3 windows open.

I'm currently using FancyZones because it seems like the least buggy option, but you really need to manually create and manually switch to a layout for every number of windows you want visible, and that's not great.

I used to use magnet on the mac, which does hotkeys, but not sure about mouse driven.

https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/

For mac BetterTouchTool is a paid option but allows you to define custom snap areas for windows. Have to restart it occasionally but it's relatively stable and has made my super-ultrawide usable on mac.

FancyZones has keyboard support as well - it overrides the default Windows snap keys (Win-Left and Win-Right) if that option is selected in the FZ options.

I kinda always wanted to try a tiling window manager but, since I mainly work on Windows I've grown used to AltDrag, GridMove and, recently, FancyZones@PowerToys.

Any reasons a tiling window manager is superior to using keyboard shortcuts to move windows around predefined spaces and draging/resizing them by alt+lmb/rmb anywhere on the window?

I've been bouncing between tiling and pseudo tiling on lightweight wm's on Linux - I guess I'd say the advantage to tiling is a more intricate layout. It's just more strongly defined[1], which can be a pro or a con depending on your screen, what applications you're using, etc. I find for programming, tiling can be helpful bc I just don't have to think about window placement, but if I'm switching between many tasks frequently the flexibility of stacking is always nice. Overall, it's just subjective.

1: In general - this does vary within tiling WM's too. dwm is more dynamic (hence the name) then i3 or imo bspwm.

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