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Friendly tiling setup for a laptop? (tiling window manager?) (lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz)
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by BigHeadMode@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I have a laptop with an 11 inch screen and 768p display. Naturally, my usage breakdown is:

  • 80% one window in fullscreen
  • 15% two windows side by side
  • 5% other

I've considered tiling window managers. I used i3wm on this in the past. It was a little complicated and I customized the bottom bar to show commands for dummies.

alt-Enter: term | alt-D: launch | alt-F: fullsc | alt-1: new workspace | alt-shift-1: move to workspace

That plus some battery, wifi, time info. I never got 'good' with i3 and would consult the cheat sheet regularly.

Is there a paradigm (tiling or otherwise) that would let me quickly and simply launch programs with the keyboard (like most distros these days) and switch between fullscreen windows? and set them side by side as needed?

My usage is keyboard-first but mouse-available. i3 didn't seem tailored to mouse usage the way some other tiling wms are. and sometimes you'd launch a program like the wifi settings window and it wasn't built to be resized for a twm, so it looked weird. (no floating window support.)

edit: Tried

  • cachy+LxQt
  • cachy+niri
  • AntiX + IceWM

Couldn't figure out how to remap keys in LxQt. Niri was cool but a bit overwhelming especially on a laptop with just kb+touchpad and it's easy to back yourself into a corner (window wider than the monitor).

IceWM allows for super+arrows to move windows side by side like Windows. I don't love it but it works okay. Performance is also a big concern and my idle RAM seems to be around 300M for AntiX vs 700+ for cachy+niri.

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[-] pr06lefs@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I dunno about 'friendly', but my setup is minimal configuration and about as stable and unchanging as the terminal. Its xmonad with xfce in no-desktop mode. My xmonad configuration is extremely minimal because I mostly don't care about customization. I set terminal=alacritty and the thickness and color of the outline around the focus window, and that's it.

Because I have xfce backing me up, I get the benefit of monitor layout, mouse settings, the xfce session logout window, etc etc.

As for using xmonad itself. You're just going to have to pull up the keyboard reference on your phone until you can get around ok, there's no help and no explanation. When you boot into it you get a blank screen lol.

For launching programs, you windows-p and you get the dmenu program launcher at the top of the screen. Type the first few letters of whatever program and hit enter.

this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2025
44 points (97.8% liked)

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