And omg! I have slept on this feature for so long. I assumed it was just dragging windows to corners and they snap on to the left or right back or top. Then, I installed PopOS and saw an explicit button to turn on windows tiling but I was already using the drag function, so I was confused. I turned it on and omg! I have not felt more stupid and happily surprised by a piece of tech in a while. It just works. I don’t have to be worry about arranging windows a special way for multitasking or for following guides. So much time saved.
How to make the most of it? Have you had a similar experience with something?
Too much people, including some popular youtuber, dont understand how tilling WMs make life easier.
I agree. It seems like a genuinely underrated feature, a surprise in today’s landscape where everything has its backers.
is there a good video demonstrating it? I use Cinnamon on Linux Mint and want to know what I’m missing out on.
You can use gtile on mint. It’s in the extensions settings
Does that auto tile though?
Nope. You press the hot key and then select on the menu where you want the program to be placed
I believe pop does a river style tiling system. Look up videos on Niri, Cosmic, or PaperWM.
There are many other tiling types too. River is however my favorite and I think most intuitive. Other popular ones are Sway, i3, and HyprLand.
Edit: my bad, seems like I misunderstood. PopOS used/is still using GNOME and has a Auto-Tiling plugin that behaves like i3wm (?). I guess this is what OP is talking about!
Not entirely sure what you mean. PopOS, developed by System76, uses the Cosmic DE, which is itself also developed by System76.
River is a dynamic tiling WM which is known for it’s customizability among Wayland WMs, as it doesn’t distinguish itself with it’s “layout generator” (though it does come with a very basic one), but instead let’s the user write their own or use an existing, third-party one. This way you can achieve essentially any dynamic tiling behavior with River.
How does PopOS use a system like that? Or do you mean that Cosmic is DWM-style, i.e., dynamic and with tags?
I do agree that River is wonderful though!
And PaperWM is a gnome plugin I thought was developed by System76 as a prototype for Cosmic.
Edit: seems i just made that up too lol
I guess I meant scrollable tile system. I thought the horizontal ones were called river. TIL.
I’ve used i3wm for a long time now before switching to hyprland. The top useful thing: Workspaces. Even without tiling, workspaces give a massive productivity boost. You can have email clients open on one, monitoring systems on another, browsing on a third, gaming on a fourth. When you combine with tiling, everything is in its own perfect space and nothing overlaps. This is especially useful on single-monitor or laptop setups as you don’t need multiple monitors to keep track of everything.
I also see people struggle with notifications tiling. You probably don’t want a bluetooth connected message to take up half your screen, so you’ll want to make sure to properly configure those things. At least in i3wm/hyprland, you can use the window class name to exclude a window from tiling (ex.
for_window [class="mako"] floating enableorwindowrulev2 = float,class:^(mako)$).How to make the most of it?
Use workspaces, I almost never used it before because I was set in my ways, but after switching to tiling WM it’s a must and increases productivity by a LOT, I’ve grown so used to it that using windows with a mouse feels super clunky and cluttered.
I started with pop!_os and still use it (though now with a proper TWM on top), and I can’t go back to a non-tiling desktop honestly lol. I can’t wait for COSMIC to come out as even in alpha that’s my favourite tiling experience
Which TWM? What is the advantage over the default one?
You do not use TWM, do you?
Not quite hah :3
It’s actually not one of the things I’ve tried when looking for the best DE/WM for me, though I might at some point just to see if im missing out on anything
The original TWM is definetely an experience nobody should miss. Like lighting a fire or washing your clothes manually.
You could try also:
- GNOME PaperWM, a GNOME extension with tiling and endless horizontal scrolling
- niri
- StumpWM, a tiling WM with Emacs-like keybindings (and zero eyecandy and waste of screen estate)
- HerbstluftWM
Yup, came here to mention PaperWM. I used xmonad in the past, but I executed it on top of Mate to have an “easy” desktop environment.
Nowadays Gnome extensions providing tiling is the equivalent “easy” method. Gnome is not for everyone, but it works out of the box- then you add the fancy tiling window management on top.
For people who have bounced off systems that require much more set up, I think they are a good option.
I partially get around the loss of my tiling WMs on my work PC (macbook) by leaning heavily into tmux. I know there are MacOS tiling managers like spectacles but I prefer using applications that are multiplatform so I have “transferable skills”.
100%. Learning a crossplatform thing is always better, especially when using proprietary OS.
How useful is tmux as compared to regular tiling? It might be a bit janky, I suppose.
Depends how much time you spend in the terminal but if you spend a lot of time there then it can just about replace a tiling VM with a maximised terminal screen. Has full functionality to add workspaces, sessions and split windows horizontally/vertically.
Ohh, so if I want to go full terminal, this might be better.
Check out Amethyst for MacOS.
Even just the key combos (win+numpad) to do basic tiling in XFCE are a huge plus
Is this a thing on all DEs?
to tell you the truth, I don’t know! I think I just saw someone asking about tiling window managers in some forum, and a reply suggested trying the xfce functions since they mostly just wanted to use two side-by-side windows occasionally. I do it a good chunk of the time now, but it’s not always the most convenient method on small screens & monitors
Oh. A common theme in replies to this post has been that people don’t know much about tiling and are curious but not enough to get into it.
I use XFCE when not on tiling WMs
Well I recently tried Niri, a scrolling window manager and felt the same.
Sounds interesting. It is a whole new world
Yeah. I have been using tiling managers for years now but if you tile too much on a single workspace, you make windows too small as you run out of space. Niri allows you to extend the same workforce by scrolling sideways or down, so you can keep windows organized like you want in the same workspace.
I have noticed in comments and other online forums that people with smaller screens don’t like tiling due to this exact thing. This is a solution, sadly not implemented widely.
Like how small? I tile on my 14" laptop screen and still infinitely prefer it over floating. Workspaces exist so you don’t clutter up one screen too much. Maybe people aren’t familiar with or used to taking advantage of multiple workspaces? I started using them more when i3 introduced me to a simple super+number hotkey system to switch quickly.
I don’t know. People in general say it doesn’t work well on laptops.
Niri rocks
I installed I3 a few times. I did not get it and I was to lazy to look up how to use it. Somehow your post made me install it again. This time I took that moment to look up how to use it. Less than 15 min later I found myself banging my head against the wall. Should have looked it’s usage up the first time I installed it. This is what I need like 70% of the time. THNX!
People keep praising twm like a hidden secret. I have tried this multiple times without much attraction. I do not understand something. Maybe everyone has 21" screen.
I have 19" screen. It saves time, especially when you open a tab for minute, then minimise it.
I don’t know how anyone does anything with tiling windows. They must all be sooooo small…
You don’t usually have them all open at the same time, you minimize some. Or maybe you add more monitors.
So you never have >2 windows open?
It depends, up to four works for some apps depending on monitor size, but otherwise I do the same thing as @Nibodhika@lemmy.world.
Overlapping window managers, the most common type in use by far, just seem crazy to me. Windows almost never use the available monitor space, and they have to constantly be wrangled around each other so that… you can drag something instead of using the clipboard, I guess?
Haha yeah I agree completely. I don’t understand how anyone prefers floating windows. It just feels so clumsy to use now that i’m used to tiling.
That’s where workspaces come in place, I usually have a single full screen application per workspace, so Meta+1 is my browser, Meta+3 is my IDE, Meta+4 is slack, etc. Some workspaces have more than one application, e.g. I usually keep a few terminals in Meta+2.
This means that I usually work with things occupying all of my screen and in a short keystrokes I’m in whatever I want to be. But if I ever need to open a terminal or a random application it will occupy half my screen and whatever I was doing would resize to the other half, so I never have to grab my mouse to move stuff over to be able to see what I was doing.
Yeah, it was a revelation when I discovered tiling. I was always doing work with two windows open, and i’d spend so much time fiddling and resizing the windows. Then i’d open a third window and wouldn’t know what to do with it.
I used i3 for many years and switched to sway when migrating to wayland. It does what I need and see no reason to try hyprland or other tilers.
This first paragraph is so me.
Any good wayland implementation? I’m OS hopping to fedora kinoite. I never used tiling now I see the difference from your reply. I’m the dummy.
Sway is wayland. I’ve never used anything else. People rave about hyprland. Others in this thread have recommend plugins for the usual desktops. Probably easy enough to try one for whichever desktop you use now.
