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Comment by hiAndrewQuinn | Hacker News Reader

Love both i3wm and Sway WM. This is what computing should be.

Windows has surprisingly decent tiling functions out of the box, too, but you'd never realize it without some experimentation. Next time you're at a Windows box, try holding Win, maybe Shift as well, and mashing the arrow keys. A minute or two of experimentation might make your whole $DAYJOB workflow that much more enjoyable!

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Rectangle (https://rectangleapp.com/) makes macOS window management good enough (for a non-tiling WM), by adding keyboard shortcuts and drag gestures.

And the new MacOS version also finally got Windows XP style tiling. (I still like Rectangle because I can do it from a longer distance..)

I tried that, but most apps just don't scale down well. Important UI elements just disappear, while less important elements maintain their size, unless the app has most of the screen. Those are apps like teams and outlook that I would expect most office users to keep open all the time on Windows (teams is really bad about assuming I want to see the avatar of whoever is speaking more than their slides). Edge did a little better, depending on the page I was looking at.

This is one of my pet peeves as a visually impaired person. Basically nothing scales right for me anymore. Apps and websites designed for desktops have such insane padding that when I scale them up, basic information is truncated.

By the time they're easily readable for me, 'progressive' websites go into mobile mode and do things like collapse their (non-resizeable) sidebars. Last week I tried to cut down on excess padding in a sidebar by resizing it and literally watched it go from 40% excess/wasted horizontal space to completely collapsed and hidden behind another click (and thus unusable with keyboard friendly addons like Pentadactyl).

User styling can fix some websites at a high cost of fiddling with the layout

But we do need some a shift away from this awful low density design paradigm

If you live in the US you may have an ADA case against whoever does the website. Many other countries have their own version of that with different rules.

I do keep Outlook and Teams open basically all the time, and full-screened, yes. Here I can only counsel that having multiple smaller monitors was a wiser investment dollar per dollar than one big monitor.

KDE also has extensive keyboard shortcuts for window management (among other things) but most of them are not set by default.

I didn't know that! Tracks with my experience with playing around with KDE, like, a decade ago. So much user-configurable power lying just under the surface.

One thing I love about kwin is that the exposé feature lets you navigate the windows with the keyboard. macOS itself doesn’t have that feature.

I want to love KDE, I really do, but I've grown to love gnome and os x's ability to have close, min, max buttons down in the toolbar for apps as that saves a significant amount of screen real estate. I tried out kde plasma for a while and just couldn't get past it.

Having said that, I did discover kde connect while using that, and I love that app! It's so nice for putting audio books on my phone and controlling playback

KDE has this feature now, you just have to add the global menu applet to your task bar and it will do the Unity/Apple thing where the task bar is relevant to the selected application

Client Side Decorations are different than moving the menu bar.

Even using the global menu in KDE (which isn't that new BTW, I think it was in KDE3), you'll still have a "height = title bar + toolbar", where with CSD it's "height = toolbar".

I hate the client-side decorations in gnome. I should note it moved my two most used buttons approximately 2000 pixels away from each other (they used to be quite close) in my most used Gnome app, so it might not be an entirely rational hate.

[edit]

I should also say that Gnome apps with CSDs work just fine in KDE with kwin and hide the title bar automatically as expected (I use Evolution, and Document Scanner regularly).

Something that isn't clear to me is why there has to be a hard divide between CSD and SSD. Is there anything in the Wayland spec that prevents UI frameworks from saying, "hey windowmanager/compositor, here's where control widgets go for this window", allowing WM-drawn controls to live on the same plane of existence as program-drawn controls? That along with some way for the WM/compositor to tell the UI framework if the user wants a discrete titlebar or if they're cool with the UI framework doing its own thing seems like it'd make everybody happy.

Nothing technical in the way. I don't see Gnome adding such a feature though.

The main reason I know that GNOME doesn't implement xdg-decoration is to specifically not have to draw anything itself ontop of the surfaces of clients. It would then need to kinda synchronize the rendering of its stuff with the update loop of the application.

The only time I can remember when Mutter/gnome-shell draws over the client is when it stops updating over the wayland socket (freezes), so there isn't really an update loop it needs to synchronize to.

It's the one thing I hack into macOS (I use BetterTouchTool for this but only because I already have a license from back when I wanted to mod my TouchBar), and would otherwise genuinely miss coming from any other operating system. I think even iPadOS has tiling shortcuts!

You can also get true tiling window management with Amethyst, or Hammerspoon if you love customizing things in Lua and starting from an absolutely empty configuration.

Just want to add that I'm having a pretty good experience with Amethyst. No file-based configuration, sadly, but it does all of the tiling and movements I need.

Hammerspoon (via Spacehammer) seemed too slow for me.

There is also rather new decent competitor for Sway: https://hyprland.org/

I've been using Awesome for about two years and started using Hyprland in parallel due to its very good multi monitor + multi resolution support and it's been great.

The only two issues I have with it is slightly increased power draw from ~7w to ~10w on idle and screen sharing does not work. I use very default configs so maintaing both is not an overhead.

Awesome offers very high dpi and battery life and Hyprland smooth animations and multi resolution support.

For those on macOS, yabai + skhd have been part of my workflow for years now. They are fantastic to bridge the gap I miss so much from i3.

I switched to Aerospace from Yabai

I switched to Hammerspoon... seems to be good enough with enormous power if you know Lua.

I used it for years too but had issues with managed laptops and security settings, I've heard that aerospace is meant to work even then.

If anyone reading this wants to take a stab at tiling wm in Mac don't be deterred, there are good options available there too.

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