I used to use Sway and I found tiling to be useful only when using multiple terminals. Tmux allows me to have tiling functionalities for terminals while having a full desktop environment for all other applications.
Why do we need tmux if we have tiling window managers?
for when we SSH
Have you heard of our lord and savior
mosh?
For most people using a tiling window manager is something they want for their whole user experience, not just for tiling terminals haha
Because not everything can be viewed in terminal, crab_man
I’ve tried hard to get libreoffice and dvddisaster to render in a terminal but for some reason it never works… 😏
You could probably get it to work in a framebuffer… 😏
Probably not though, although some apps like mpv, (maybe vlc) and mplayer can, plus QT and a GTK fork have support too.
Mplayer can render to the terminal using aalib
I guess if you have to use a classical terminal or terminal emulator, but I was more talking about drawing apps directly to the Linux console without X or another sort of windowing system.
For example this is Midori, a web browser:
Well yes I thought you were using emulators. When I was a kid I would frequently break X11 so I spent much of my time on the console framebuffer. All I needed it to to is let me watch TV and videos till I was bothered to fix the config file for X
Because I don’t want my Firefox window overlapping my Vim window.
Because I don’t like things to be behind other things. And I feel like moving windows around is a waste of effort and time, and also requires using the mouse where I wouldn’t normally have to. Tiling windows and using workspaces to organize my work/play/attention works very well for me and helps keep my focus where I want it.
Also sway in particular, but other tiling window managers too, have better output management than standard DEs. If I’m on output 3 workspace 12 and I want to do something new, any new window I open stays on output 3 workspace 12. I have a lot of displays and not being surprised about where windows open is extremely helpful.
while having a full desktop environment for all other applications.
What if I don’t want that?
I use sway because it gives me 4 hours more battery life compared to gnome.
Try managing thousands of images with Unix timestamps for names with only the terminal. Or browsing the web.
There’s tons of stuff that is simply better done in a GUI.
Tiling at the window level makes much more sense and is technologically more sound than pushing windowing into the terminal output. Also see this comment by the creator of the kitty terminal emulator.
Quite the interesting read, thanks for sharing!
Is there any good alternative to tmux’s ability to create sessions and attach/detach from them? It gets installed on all my servers strictly for this ability.
I use both 🤷♀️
You can basically have a “full” desktop environment with hyprland+nwg-panel+7 other programs, I’m not sure why nobody has distributed something like this preconfigured though. I’m planning on cooking one up.
It’s called GNU Emacs and it’s been distributed for decades now.
gaps
Every once in awhile i think „yeah, let‘s move to a tiling wm“….but i find myself going back to gnome shortly after, because i can‘t get really used to it, although i really like the concept of tiling WMs…who knows, maybe today is a good day to try it again :)
Some people just don’t vibe with tiling WMs and that’s fine. Kind of a reflection of your inner personnality.
I can’t for the life of me not have stacks of things on my desk, and unsurprisingly that’s how I like my windows as well.
You can have both, https://github.com/pop-os/shell
just installed it and currently in testing. Thanks for the suggestion!
Hell yea! I’ve used PopOS for a couple years now and it’s pretty fantastic. Being able to enable/disable it on the fly is super great, and you still have all the conveniences of a full DE.
Yeah i feel that. It takes a while, once you’re settled in and have done a bit of configuring to make a tiling wm work a specific way then it starts getting harder to go back. I would flip flop between KDE Plasma and either i3 or sway for a long while but eventually my sway config got to a point where I just prefer using it full time as I have to put in more work to make Plasma behave the same way.
That being said i still keep Plasma installed in case i get an itch to just use a DE like that for a bit. Or to check out updates for it.
yeah, i think i just never to got to that point you’re describing (to have such an extended and working config, that the switch back to a DE would be more effort than just keep going).
another aspect – DistroTube did a 10 minute video explaining workspaces were the killer feature of tiling window managers rather than the tiling itself …
