I've been using tiling WMs for some years now (mostly sway, but also tested cosmic a bit). I really love them: you theme workspaces and organize everything into them, and no window is ever hidden, which makes finding them trivial. But the cost of having every window displayed in that workspace is that they start getting way too small when you have a lot of them. This is usually not a big deal, since you can create tabs or just open new generic workspaces.
But what has been bugging me are windows that need to be big, otherwise they are unusable (like gimp, kdenlive, libreoffice, sometimes firefox). Tabbing them in fullscreen messes with the workspace layout, and if you dedicate an entire generic workspace for them, you surely will lose it.
That's where scrollable WMs enter the scene. They respect window sizes at the cost of their visibility.
niri.gif
NGL, this is not a good idea. It's easy to lose windows that are off-screen. But what if you only use it sometimes? Think of it as a regular tiling WM, but when you need it, it creates more space off-screen.
To achieve this, I've been using Niri with the tilemod script. It helps make Niri behave more like a regular tiling.
tilemod.gif
It's been a good experience over the last week. My workflow is mostly unchanged, but when I need to work with a window in fullscreen, it's always a relief that I'm using Niri.
Has anyone else here tried scrollables? I'm in this excitement phase so I want to read more about it (even from people who tried and didn't like them) :)
What do you mean by that?
well, here's the shitposty thread I made last time I tried to voice the opinion and got got by gotchas in terminology :
https://lemmy.world/post/51030053?scrollToComments=true
I feel like that's by design. Tiling WMs generally make 2 assumptions and if they aren't true for you then you're probably better off with a regular desktop:
For a lot of people that makes sense because Workspace-based WMs let you switch between full screen apps a lot quicker than pressing alt-tab 10 times. e.g. when I'm doing work I'll usually have these Fullscreen windows open:
For me at least, every extra second it takes me to move between apps snowballs because I have to pause my thought just to find the app I'm looking for in the alt tab menu or the task bar
Yeah, it doesn't vibe with me because I'm constantly moving windows from one place to another, comparing shit side by side and needing one thing as an edit then as a reference, keeping some things smaller and etc. I am starting to be maybe interested in trying out transparancy in my dropdown console and maybe a launcher that's more central instead of "windows like" coming in from the bottom left. But I like my taskbars, especially with having different ones for different physical monitors.