Sure why not.

https://pixelfed.sdf.org/storage/m/_v2/591190770262595513/0e43b1202-69768b/45cq7hujKP6g/atSfzBv3qHWJ59yITdTOgbxrwf6eWsQbCh3hI6kn.png

But there's notthing spectacular or out of the ordinary here: it's just a boring-ass, bog-standard i3 installation. What I spent time configuring isn't visible - stuff like keyboard bindings, how it starts, how it handles multiple monitors... things like that.

Nice idea!

what i don’t like about most tiling WMs is they are keyboard only. you can’t hold a beverage in one hand and use them easily with the mouse.

Depends. Here for example, I'm lounging in the couch with a beer in one hand, watching Youtube videos in FreeTube, chatting with a friend in Signal and lazily browsing a few browser tabs and windows the rest of the time. The browser windows are arranged in one tabbed workspace, Signal in another workspace and Freetube in a third workspace, all of which are available with a mouse click. I'm basically not touching the keyboard unless I have to.

I guess it depends on how involved you want things to be with one hand clutching a beer 🙂 Me, that's as complicated as I'm willing to let things get when I booze.

I created Wintile for gnome because of this. Will have to take a look at Forge.

Sway by default lets you move windows by dragging their title bar. Minimise/maximise doesn't make sense in Sway, but adding fullscreen and close behaviour to buttons on your menubar of choice or extra mouse buttons would be pretty easy. Graphical app launchers exist too — I use one in Sway on my Yoga since I primarily use its touchscreen.

I appreciate those things aren't in place by default, but they are kinda antithetical to the tiling paradigm, and if you're using something like Sway then you're probably tinkering a ton with it anyway.

I kinda like the keyboard shortcuts for i3/sway, but wish there was some level of mouse integration/polish like gnome. Will try forge, thanks!

Just checked Forge. Seems like repo had been archived 2 days ago. Ouch... I was so hopeful. Maintaining a FOSS project is a lot of work. I am very grateful to all the devs that are doing it. Thisagain reminds thatwe need to donate and support greatdevs. Couldn't help but notice the pattern. Bismuth / KDE, Forge / Gnome.

Personnaly I don't need to manipulate windows with Bspwm. How they spawn is fine for me.

I don't use i3 because windows spawns in such a layout that force to use shortcuts for changing the layout. Bspwm displays everything in nice rectangles.

To start apps you can keep an application menu in your bar, such as Whisker menu, or the KDE bar, while having a tiling window manager, so you can run apps with mouse clicks. And after the spawn you should not need to manipulate them if you use more automatized tiling WM such as Bspwm or Xmonad.

I use sway on my phone, had to add a secondary menu bar with a few keys for stuff like opening rofi, but it works perfectly fine otherwise

popos tiling works this way as well.

now where I have to use a Mac

Why did you start using a Mac? It sounds like a couple of steps backward in terms of freedom.

Also, I did a quick a quick search and this came up.

Have you tried yabai or amethyst? Both really solid macOS tilers

This really appealed to me too but I also want fixed workspace numbers and workspaces per monitor and paperwm shat itself on the former (Ubuntu, 22.04 and 24.04) and didn't appear to offer the latter as far as I could tell, or anything I could manage to work reasonably with multiple monitors.

Perhaps I really just didn't understand the intended workflow with workspaces and monitors but I couldn't find anything coherent. It seemed like the only option was either only workspaces on one of the monitors, or move workspaces in lockstep across all monitors (more a Gnome failing than a PaperWM failing). Neither of which made sense to me. So I scuttled back to i3 again in the end.

This one.

Well, Sway and Gnome. But I already know Gnome so Sway piqued my interest.

practice the shortcuts

You know, I used to think like that when I first learned Unix shell commands and vi. I shlepped through the learning process because I had to when I was a student. Then after graduation, I joined a Unix company so I was dragged deeper into it screaming and kicking, and I kept picking up more and more commands and shortcuts until they etched themselves deep into my muscle memory. At some point, it all stopped being a chore and it became second nature.

And it went like that for many other software I've used. Decades later, I get the payoff: I'm a fast engineer and the friction between what I want to do and the final result is very low despite working 90% of the time with the keyboard.

It was a pain to get there and it took a mighty long time, I'll be honest. but I reap the benefits now.

If I were you, I'd make the effort for that sort of thing. A couple of months tops: if you don't like it, you'll have wasted 2 months of your life. If you do, you'll have gained skills that will pay for your efforts for the rest of your life many times over.

Sway sort of does that. It does not resize live, but uses a transparent overlay to show where the window will be. You can do all of the moving and resizing with the mouse this way.

That's what I thought too - and I tried other tiling window managers in the past, only to quickly return to whatever I was used to. But somehow i3 hit the spot, It you're used to screen or tmux, this thing has the same DNA and you'll feel right at home. Give it an honest try, you might just like it.

But I do believe that you kind of have to be halfway there already to "get it". My halfway-there was being so used to the same concept in the terminal. If you're never exposed to tiling in any way, shape or form, maybe it's more of a stretch.