Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

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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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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