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Comment by m1keil | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody knows about a tiling WM that allows customising the position of the first window you open? I have an ultra wide display, and I want the first window I open to be roughly 1/3 in screen width and placed in the centre. From memory of playing with i3/sway, it would allow different layouts but the 1st screen would always be full screen and I would have to do something like choose "thirds layout" and "open terminal, open app I want, open terminal".

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I do something like that on a 49 inch 32:9 ultra wide with hyprland.i don't have my config handy but basically you want to use the master layout and set orientation to center. You can also play around with new_is_master and always_center_master based on your preferences.

https://wiki.hyprland.org/Configuring/Master-Layout/

Thanks, will take a look.

Please report back if it is working for you. I have the same problem.

I just changed and this is a LOT nicer! Also on a 49" ultrawide

Thanks for the protip!

You can also use the swapwithmaster dispatch to cycle windows into the center position with a keyboard shortcut.

I wrote my own layout manager to do exactly this:

https://github.com/pkulak/filtile

I did this with AwesomeWM. The Lain (plugin/extension/i forget what its called in awesome) has a "centerwork" style layout that solves this exact issue.

Actually it's really surprising how few tiling WMs support this sort of scenario.

I eventually just gave up and switched to KDE+KZones as it covers 90% of what I'd get from a tiling WM anyway.

That's possible with Niri, with its center-focused-column and default-column-width settings. It's not a traditional tiling WM, though

Never heard of Niri before. Will take a look, cheers.

I do it with PaperWM which is a niri-like Gnome extension.

IIRC, Sway supports this. On an empty workspace, the first window I open is centered and about 800x800px, and on opening a second, both windows begin tiling and take up the whole screen.

I think is the relevant setting:

    # Only enable outer gaps when there is exactly one container
    smart_gaps inverse_outer

And I have these gap values in my config:

    gaps horizontal 1000px
    gaps vertical 100px

HTH

Hyprland can do that, quite easily. It has windows rules that allow you to place everything just so.

That's one of the reasons I use i3.

  gaps horizontal 417
  gaps inner      10
  smart_gaps inverse_outer

https://imgur.com/a/MjNBgms

Related question, since we're on the topic: does Linux have a way to split a single wide monitor into smaller "virtual" monitors?

I do this with xmonad. https://xmonad.github.io/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-L...

X does, you can use xrandr --setmonitor.

For example, splitting a 5120x1440 monitor into three:

  xrandr --setmonitor DisplayPort-0-0 1280/297x1440/340+0+0 none
  xrandr --setmonitor DisplayPort-0-1 2560/595x1440/340+1280+0 none
  xrandr --setmonitor DisplayPort-0-2 1280/297x1440/340+3840+0 none

I'd like to do this under AwesomeWM but cannot https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/issues/3132

Dwm has a patch for this. I think you can use vanity gaps, and make the outer gaps depend on a layout or window rule.

you can write a script to hack that behaviour with i3-msg `i3-msg -t get_tree`. it's frustrating that you cant have empty tiles though, you'll need to write in your a script 0% opacity panes that get replaced when a new windows is created.

hyprland isnt a window manager, its a wayland compositor that doesnt sacrifice on looks

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