Hacker News Reader

Comment by chillbill | Hacker News Reader

I’m afraid i3/sway have spoiled me and now I find any other wm just awfully bulky to say the least, but also I can’t imagine how to use tiling wm without a keyboard. Are there any projects exploring the idea of tiling wm usage on tablets?

View on HN

There is at least one: SXMO [0] . There are a few distributions where it's available, at least on the PinePhone, so it's not inconceivable at all that it would possible to use it on an Intel-bsaed tablet.

0: https://sxmo.org/ "Simple X Mobile"

Extra quote from their docs:

> Sxmo >= 1.6.0 runs both on Xorg (using dwm) as well as on Wayland (using sway). The X in our name historically referred to Xorg, but is now open to whatever interpretation you prefer (eXtensible, eXcellent, eXperimental, etc...)

Note: I have yet to try it but I'm getting more interested now..

In some ways, tiling WMs are a natural fit for tablets — consider e.g. the iPad’s ‘split screen’ mode, where two windows take up the whole screen between them. It’s easy enough to imagine a WM where you can drag windows to move them around, and drag the splits between them to resize. On Linux, this kind of paradigm is implemented by e.g. Hyprland. I dislike it for desktop, but on a tablet I’d happily use it.

In my limited experience, sway is pretty easy to use on a tablet because it supports moving windows very will using a mouse/pointer. Obviously you need still need a on-screen keyboard and a lot of config to replace other swaycmds but it seems like a decent base WM for a tablet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com