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Comment by siliconc0w | Hacker News Reader

I might be in the minority but I actually like overlapping windows - often the entire window is not necessary to get the data I am interested in. Right now I'm running tests in another window and I have a sliver of that window visible while the majority of the screen real-estate gets used for the browser in primary window.

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I'm beginning to really like scrolling window managers.

It's optimized for minimal splits (let's say 2-3 windows) per view but it makes it effortless to flip between apps. Floating windows is also an option and making any of them full screen is available too.

Imagine tiling a bunch of pieces of paper on your floor and now you want to focus on a few of them at a time. That's basically what a scrolling window manager allows, you can either swipe on a touchpad, hit the arrow keys or use your mouse wheel to cycle between stuff. Of course you can customize these, that's just a reasonable default.

It's so much faster than manually dealing with workspaces IMO.

I'm currently taking a look into both Hyprland's scrolling plugins and if that fails then Niri. I wish Hyprland's official scrolling plugin was not in an alpha state. I want to stick with Hyprland because everything else about it is really nice.

All of this stuff works independent of Omarchy too since it's 100% related to your window manager.

Here's a video demo: https://youtu.be/r0JUm77inIA?t=319

[Note: I'm not the author of the video but I jumped to a timestamp where he's showing Niri's scrolling features]

That sounds like exactly what I've wanted - Sort of like those blackboards / whiteboards that you can roll around.

What's your favorite? Right now I'm on xfce and KDE as my daily drivers but I'll shop around next time I wanna shake things up

> Sort of like those blackboards / whiteboards that you can roll around.

Yes exactly. Since I was a kid, I always envisioned a future world where all of my walls were a monitor and I could just move across them as needed to focus on things. A scrolling manager isn't quite that but it's in the right direction.

I don't like switching between full screen windows because mentally it's so much easier (IMO) to keep things in context when I see all the important things at once. I want to see my code, the terminal output, search results and the docs in 1 view but when I don't care about the search results and docs I want to quickly throw them off to the side, but still have them available if needed on demand.

Situational splitting with scrolling allows for the above without the cognitive load of hitting a million hotkeys to move things to workspaces and balance your splits.

I've always felt like with traditional tiled window managers you're trading 1 problem for another. Instead of meddling with every floated window's size and position you're meddling with split sizes and workspace management.

> What's your favorite?

It's too soon to say as I've only recently discovered them. I do think Niri and Hyprland with https://github.com/cpiber/hyprscroller or https://github.com/hyprwm/hyprland-plugins are places to start. Niri has scrolling as a first class feature. The first Hyprland link is a fork of a deprecated plugin and the 2nd link is an official new plugin but it's super bare bones and a big WIP.

The hyprscroller author made a fork of sway called scroll: https://github.com/dawsers/scroll

I quite like it!

You can try Karousel on KDE.

Earlier concepts existed but it all exploded with PaperWM on Gnome.

There is niri, scroll(sway), papersway, hyprland's plugins, PaperWM, PaperWM.spoon on Mac, Komorebi on Windows etc

FYI: The author of Hyprland's scrolling plugin (not the official one) had archived it and instead forked sway to create scroll.

https://github.com/dawsers/scroll https://github.com/dawsers/hyprscroller

Happy niri user checking in. Hard to imagine going back to a non-scrolling wm. Niri also has a decent config and builtins like screenshotting too.

Yep. It keeps getting better. I was recently in the market for a new laptop, and Niri is partly why I didn’t buy a MacBook. It’s hard for me to imagine going back to osx.

Indeed, although I find hyprshot + satty a pretty good combo. It's almost as good as Flameshot.

I think it's really important to be able to take a region, specific window or full display screenshot with an ability to annotate afterwards and then also have an option to save to disk or copy to clipboard depending on what you want to do for that screenshot.

Flameshot was ideal because it lets you adjust the region size while also having the annotation controls at the same time. All of these other solutions don't let you adjust the region during annotation time since you're piping the image data into a different annotation tool.

I recently switched to niri from sway. I do like it ... There's something nice and spatial about it that makes keeping track of what's where really easy.

I recall being able to set FVWM2 desktop size larger than the screen size. Some people went really large with this, but I found it way too easy to lose track of windows. I’m curious as to how these new window managers are different.

Definitely makes logical sense.

I'm not a big fan of "workspaces" but I do love tiling WM with multiple screens.

My desktop at home is Ubuntu + i3 but I keep experimenting on my laptop with different WM. It's currently running Regolith but I'm probably going to try Omarchy 2.0...2.1 maybe? Let it simmer a little.

I saw a scrolling WM video recently and _loved_ what I saw, just too busy to set it up right now. Lots of potential there.

(CMD|CTRL)+TAB is all I usually all I need. I know this may sound wasteful considering that I have two eyes, but I have only ever been able to focus my eyes on a single thing at a time. I usually make the window take up the full window, and I just switch between windows. It is fast to do this. I tried multi-monitors, but it wasn't for me.

I tried Omarchy for a bit. It's a nice setup and DHH made some good choices, but I'm right there with you.

Most often, I use maximized windows for the things I'm actively working on and floating windows for something like popping over to a file manager for a quick operation. In Hyprland, this often meant using separate workspaces for the main apps I always have open and workspace switching is more effort than alt+tab. I'm also a heavy user of hotkeys for my most frequent apps. They are set up to focus or launch the app.

I ended up gaining little to nothing from the Hyprland setup that I didn't already have or could easily implement in Plasma so I went back after several days. I was also having weird problems launching some games in Steam. In particular, Balatro wouldn't launch under Hyprland even though it works fine under Plasma/Wayland. I spent some time troubleshooting to no avail before deciding it just wasn't worth it.

I did get some new ideas from Omarchy though. I never thought to set up xcompose before. I also like what DHH did with PWAs.

In any case, I like what DHH is doing because it's making people try Linux when they otherwise may not have. What's especially cool is he's proving that you don't need to dumb things down, which is exactly what everyone else has tried to do all these years. Omarchy is 100% a power user setup and does an awesome job of showing what Linux is capable of while still being very accessible to newcomers.

Using SUPER+F for toggling fullscreen and SUPER+TAB to switch workspaces is basically the same workflow - it's just so much easier to customize Hyprland to be the exact way you want and Omarchy is a wonderful foundation for it. I found it had much better defaults and more intuitive customization than the Hyprland Hyprperks setup https://account.hypr.land/pricing

>Balatro wouldn't launch under Hyprland

Just tried it, worked without issue using Proton-GE https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom

Same here, multiple monitors, overlapping windows has never worked for me. I don't need big monitors for the same reason. I also make sure to keep the number of things I have open to a minimum. Then simply tabbing or using a tiling manager like i3 (without using actual tiling) (they are just faster than running full desktops). It also means I can be productive with any setup anywhere e.g. a laptop

I have all my windows centered but pyramid stacked. I can see a bit of everything but my main browser is in the center. Slack is in the upper right, and the browser leaves a bit of the Slack screen open. I keep Obsidian in the lower left such that I can see the organization panel.. it helps me keep a mental map of the notes I'm working with.

In the center are two Chrome browsers representing two separate profiles.. a personal profile for some flows, and a work profile for others. Again, stacked so that I can see most of the tabs.

I've never dared to dream that I could combine this habit with some Hyprland-style "spontaneous windows launched by keybinds". I'd love that. A prime stack of core windows and an omega stack of ephemeral windows.

When I have multiple screens I also tend to stack one above the other, as opposed to left and right.

Corner case all the way.

You’re not alone. I can’t make full-time tiling or even tiling-dominant work for me. With how my mind works, full floating 98% of the time with the occasional tile is the right blend. I tile so infrequently that tiling being keybound has net zero impact.

Majority of time I only have 2-4 apps open: terminal/IDE, browser, music player and some IM. Floating windows seems like a waste of space. Browser is full-screen on any regular proportion screen (i.e. not ultra-wide).

I rarely use floating windows, even on windowed-WMs.

I’m sure there’s differences in workflow styles. I tend to have multiple tasks in flight at any given moment and switch between them often enough that closing+opening sets of apps and windows represents showstopping overhead, so lots of things just sit open. Floating windows on mutliple desktops with dual monitors suits this style well.

It’s worth noting that I don’t spend large amounts of time in terminals and text editors, but instead in graphical apps and chrome-heavy IDEs which are awkward in tiling setups because of how much screen space they demand. If I were more terminal-heavy I’m sure tiling would make more sense.

I work on multiple tasks too, it's just all of it is done is either in a browser tab or terminal tab. Usually those live in separate virtual screens, but one of my machines has an ultrawide, so I can comfortably put 2-3 tiles on it depending on what I'm working on.

Tiling is all about efficient use of space (and wasting all gains by adding cool looking gaps to post on UnixPorn). I find floating windows just hard to navigate and wasteful when 99% of time I want the app to be in a full-screen. Hence why macOS splits get me pretty much where I want to be.

What I really want, but don't have the technical skill to write unfortunately:), is a window manager or compositor that lets me set the size of a window and the viewport into that window independently. That is, formalize the approach that yes this window is rendering as if it was taking up half the screen but I only need to actually see this tiny slice of it, so just give me a window that shows that piece

This should be possible on X11 using standard extensions. XCompositeRedirectWindow to render your window to a virtual buffer, get pixmap, bind pixmap to new croppedWindow as a GL texture, here apply a crop transform. Then optionally unmap original window. Finally, we have to remap input events. This is trivial browser-style event interception, XSelectInput, change x,y, XSendEvent. I can try to make it work sometime this week. A CLI tool you'd use like `xcropwindow windowID x y dx dy`. As a side effect, this way you can have multiple viewports into different parts of a window. But there's probably a few deal-breaker edge cases I'm missing.

On the other hand, the Great Wayland Security Theater probably doesn't admit such riff-raff.

> On the other hand, the Great Wayland Security Theater probably doesn't admit such riff-raff.

I'm pretty sure it's doable, but it probably does need to be baked into the compositor. But since there are compositors that can do full immersive 3D environments with windows moving around in them, I can't believe that there's any manipulation of the contents of a window that you can't do in Wayland.

Of course, being able to add it as tiny helper program is probably something that's going to be specific to X11, or possibly (best case) require non-portable APIs that are specific to individual compositors in Wayland.

Yeah of course the compositor can do anything, but that's completely useless. Community applications need to be able to do it. Such applications are easily the most popular productivity applications on every other OS. If they're oh-so-concerned about security, a featureful accessibility API like the one macos has is table stakes, and needs to be developed before anything else. Its disgusting to release half baked theater like wayland does. </rant>

>On the other hand, the Great Wayland Security Theater probably doesn't admit such riff-raff.

I really tried switching over to sway / wayland a couple years back, but there were just so. many. things. which, despite wayland being 'the future' and 'ready for prime time' among proponents just bugged the heck out of me.

Why is it an act of congress to setup screen sharing / recording. Like sure it works for this one fork of OBS but if I'm trying to set up a telehealth session with my doctor all of a sudden I can't share my screen? Or global hotkeys don't work? I can't easily redshift my monitor at night? Pulse audio is jank for some unknown reason (Idk if this was even related)

It was just death by a thousand cuts. When it really came down to it, wayland added nothing but headaches to my life without any discernible benefit. None of it's 'selling points' meant anything to me.

Then suddenly I remembered I'm no longer the early adopter / OSS enthusiast I was in my youth. I'm now a grumpy grey beard who just wants things to work. I installed pop 22 with gnome on xorg and went on with my life. I think it's pretty telling that cosmic was released in alpha this time last year and it's still there today. While I realize that writing a DE is a big undertaking, they were basically trying for a fresh rewrite of gnome's UI in rust under wayland. No way it would have taken this long if they were targeting x.

Thing have come so far in the past couple years that I'm not sure anything you mentioned is even a problem anymore. Global hotkeys work, pulse audio just works, screen sharing just works, redshifting is no issue?

https://wiki.hypr.land/Configuring/Binds/#global-keybinds

https://wiki.hypr.land/Hypr-Ecosystem/hyprsunset/

https://wiki.hypr.land/Useful-Utilities/Screen-Sharing/

> Hotkeys

Bullshit.

No one cares that I can go and register global hotkeys in the compositor config file. The whole point is that apps do it themselves. If you still want a security theater, then add a prompt or what macos has where you go give it permissions.

https://wearewaylandnow.com/

If you see the global hotkeys section. It still has a lot of caveats. Bonus: see what's needed for push to talk to work...

The benchmark before wayland becomes default is:

Do OBS start recording shortcuts work.

And does discord push to talk work.

Today on KDE and GNOME the answer is no.

Any distro/DE that pushes wayland as a default without the answer to both of these questions being yes is pure cancer.

For anyone interested, there is a dbus API to register shortcuts that I believe KDE supports, gnome does only since the last 6 months, and hyprland/sway don't, and likely won't. Obviously, app developers aren't going to use it with such fragmented support.

Further reading(2024): https://dec05eba.com/2024/03/29/wayland-global-hotkeys-short...

Do you mean something like this?

https://github.com/dawsers/scroll?tab=readme-ov-file#content...

I sometimes do this as well. Most tiling wms do support overlapping windows thouhg it isn't the default. But then many regular window managers will support placement of windows in various splits manually with a keypress or two so in reality the wins for tiling wms are very small in normal use. I think you have to have a crazy rate of opening and closing windows to benefit from automatic tiling which doesn't fit with my actual usage outside the terminal where I use a terminal specific tiling.

Several times I have tried to move to scrolling as I like it a lot more than tiling.

My only problem with tiling is that I usually have 2-3 apps tiled that are stable and a “gap” where I quickly pop things I only need momentarily (slack, an extra terminal, postman, whatever). I never managed that quick readjustment in tiling managers, maybe it was just lack of practice.

Also some seemed to interact badly with software that brought pop up windows/dialogs.

I don't think you're in the minority (I also prefer floating windows), it's just that as the default style of window management there's not much to say on the topic. So people don't bother.

That's just the Macbrain you have because macos didn't have any window management for long time.

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