Show HN: Komorebi – A tiling window manager for Windows 10/11 written in Rust

The official Win32 API for interacting with Virtual Desktops[1] is severely (deliberately?) lacking. There are some brave souls who are constantly reverse-engineering and figuring out how to interact with Virtual Desktops in all the ways that are missing from the official Win32 API, but this is a constant game of whack-a-mole because you never know when an update to Windows is going to break everything.[2]

If anyone working on the Virtual Desktops feature at Windows reads this: please give us a real, stable API for Virtual Desktops to develop against.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/shobjidl...

[2] https://github.com/MScholtes/VirtualDesktop/issues/35

Just to state the obvious, "hardware-specific tweaks" are hardware-specific. It is not hard, these days, to buy hardware where everything just works out of the box. It doesn't make sense to say that in general Linux sucks for laptops when what you're complaining about is a problem caused by your hardware.

Trying to understand how this relates to a tiling WM, I’m wondering if the virtual desktop in dedicated tiling WMs concept goes beyond multiple instances of the display and has arbitrary widths (or single dimension spaces)? That does sound nice for some ways I’d want a tiling WM, but it’s not what I’ve previously thought I’d want in one where I might have a grid with non-uniform x/y divisions.

Like it sounds very confusing to have a layout such as:

  a a b b c
  a a b b c
  a a d d e

The problem is that those window managers (in my opinion) is that they fail to do the basics well. You have to find the individual components like the bar if the WM comes with it and write your own scripts or hopefully find one that someone else wrote to get the things that are built into Gnome and KDE and work out of the box. You gotta set up your own notifications daemon. You need to configure how to launch applications through something like rofi or by configuring keybinds in your config. You need to configure your login windows. It can be enjoyable to a point but it can also just become really frustrating to deal with.

I think PopOS' tiling WM built on top of Gnome is pretty good but Gnome itself is frustrating trying to configure. KDE is highly configurable but its base configuration/experience is worse than Gnome.

The closest I've gotten to something that does both is replacing xfce's xfwm with i3 but ultimately it can easily break since it depends on turning off xfwm in sessions and making i3 an autolaunch item.

Linux is obviously the best for tiling WMs, but they have their own set of issues that traditional WMs on popular DEs in linux don't. Windows and MacOS have even more issues when attempting to implement them. I feel like there's just no winning here, regardless of what OS you're using.

On Linux, it's totally stable on identical workloads.

Personally, I don't see reason anymore for the existence of Windows. For a long time it held its ground as a gaming OS, but Steam/Proton has taken that final advantage from it.

In my opinion, you have right there concisely expressed the real differentiator of using a Linux tiling WM. While I understand that there exist numerous incentives for adding animations to graphical user interfaces, such as increased consumer appeal and furnishing the computer program with a time interval in which it can (re)load data, I would also like user interface designers to consider that for some, speed really is paramount, really is second to nothing, and then that those would like to opt out of animations. I care not if the GUI freezes for half a second when switching into a different context, as long as it's lower than the one-second baseline delay introduced by the designer. This becomes so much more important when dealing with the operating system --- it's in use all the time, and the time spent waiting in it compounds and throws one off! It's the "No Child Left Behind", but for GUIs --- let's file down peak performance in order to obtain a more uniform result.

On Linux using i3, swapping your workspace costs exactly nothing. I often find myself rapidly and repeatedly switching to-and-fro between any two of them, as if I were performing a trill on a musical instrument, whenever I want to compare the output of two applications. The WM is my personal concierge there. In Mac OS, it feels like I'm stuck waiting in a crowded queue at the post office when there's only one tired and miserable worker around.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%9C%A8%E6%BC%8F%E3%82%8C%E...

You can't even bind a shortcut to send a window to a specific zone.

For me, Windows must be used with mouse so Fancy Zones fits me well.

By exposing all of the functionality (aka socket messages) via a cli (komorebic), I can use whatever I want to handle my shortcuts, which in turn makes it easy to configure my shortcuts to whatever I want. An added bonus is that exposing the functionality via the cli means that I can compose multiple commands to run sequentially with a single key bind.

Honestly, this rabbit hole goes so deep. I started using Yabai on macOS, and when I switched to Windows, the experience of trying to interface with a computer without a tiling window manager was so frustrating that I had no alternative but to write my own tiling window manager (well actually I wrote two, komorebi is the second one).

In any layout, you can always use the `komorebic.exe move <OPERATION_DIRECTION>` command to place a window in the desired tile to achieve the desired size.

[1] https://lgug2z.github.io/komorebi-custom-layout-generator/

[2] https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi/#dynamically-changing-lay...