What are Reddit's favorite Window Manager Apps?

Haven't seen Spectacle mentioned here but I would highly recommend it.

That said, there is absolutely no reason not to have this as native functionality.

I would actually understand the absence of this more for Windows than OSX. We have hot corners, custom shortcuts and other desktop management features so why not reasonable window management?

Not a great solution but the guy behind better touch tool created Keyboard Clean Tool which will fully disable the keyboard while the computer is on so you can clean it.

Funnily enough apple wouldn’t let him put it on the Mac App Store because it didn’t “provide value”

Spectacle is a similar app that I've found useful for the past couple of years: https://www.spectacleapp.com/

It's free, but not on the Mac App Store which might make people wary (although it is open source).

Try BetterSnapTool.

It pretty much emulates Windows 10's vastly superior way of having windows snap to the size you want.

And BetterTouchTool from the same developer is quite handy too, especially for getting good use out of the touchbar (which I have, but I am not a fan of).

FWIW, I have the 13" 2018 MBP and it's great. I don't do much with videos or gaming so the lack of a dedicated GPU is actually a plus for me (from a battery-life perspective). I'm not saying you have to trade yours in, but you likely will not regret it.

DisplayFusion - it is the best multi-monitor management tool I've ever used. Loads better than what's included in Windows, that's for sure. $25 US for a one-computer license.

from https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html

Is Wayland network transparent / does it support remote rendering? No, that is outside the scope of Wayland. To support remote rendering you need to define a rendering API, which is something I've been very careful to avoid doing. The reason Wayland is so simple and feasible at all is that I'm sidestepping this big task and pushing it to the clients. It's an interesting challenge, a very big task and it's hard to get right, but essentially orthogonal to what Wayland tries to achieve.

This doesn't mean that remote rendering won't be possible with Wayland, it just means that you will have to put a remote rendering server on top of Wayland. One such server could be the X.org server, but other options include an RDP server, a VNC server or somebody could even invent their own new remote rendering model. Which is a feature when you think about it; layering X.org on top of Wayland has very little overhead, but the other types of remote rendering servers no longer requires X.org, and experimenting with new protocols is easier.

It is also possible to put a remoting protocol into a wayland compositor, either a standalone remoting compositor or as a part of a full desktop compositor. This will let us forward native Wayland applications. The standalone compositor could let you log into a server and run an application back on your desktop. Building the forwarding into the desktop compositor could let you export or share a window on the fly with a remote wayland compositor, for example, a friend's desktop.

As of 2020, there are several projects that use these methods to provide GUI access to remote computers. The compositor Weston provides an RDP backend. GNOME has a remote desktop server that supports VNC. WayVNC is a VNC server that works with compositors, like Sway, based on the wlroots library. Waypipe works with all Wayland compositors and offers almost-transparent application forwarding, like ssh -X.

Almost all your keyboard shortcuts are the same. Just swap out Cmd (⌘) for Ctrl. So, Copy is ⌘+C and Past is ⌘+V.

Most applications have their settings under Preferences and can be found by clicking the name of the app in the Menu Bar. A semi-universal shortcut is ⌘+,.

The Menu Bar is the thing at the top of your screen. Think of it like the System Tray in Windows.

Your function key may not work as expected. You can alter their behavior under System Preferences -> Keyboard. Same goes for most everything.

You'll probably miss window snapping. Install Spectacle. There might be others but that's what I use. Honestly, there is a little app for just about anything you need. And not just in the App Store. Most of the stuff I use is now from there.

iTerm2 is a ballin' replacement for the built in Terminal app. Install Homebrew. It's your package manager for system applications.

Learn to love Spaces. There are the bee's knees.

The best piece of advice I can give you is to drop the bullshit and learn the new tool your new job has given you. You're in good company. 80% of my company (software dev) uses a Mac. It's really developer friendly. Tons of open source stuff. Native terminal too.

Anyway - you'll totally be fine. Don't fight it. If you do you will hate it because it is not your native OS. Learn to accomplish the same things in ways that work for the OS. Or perhaps revisit your workflow. There might be better options.

Sorry you're being downvoted. You're not crazy; this exists. It's internally called Click Methods in libinput, and you're looking to use the option called clickfinger: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/1.11.3/clickpad_softbuttons.html

You can set it up to use the "old keys before the touchbar" already.

Better touch tool was the only program I needed to install. It took a little tinkering but left to right I have my escape button (in neon blue now), a pair of shortcuts to documents I use daily, a Spotify widget that plays music when I touch it plus displays the track information, a date/time widget which shows my local time (I'm out of the country for work), a second date/time widget which shows the time back home, plus your standard make screen go brighter and make screen go darker buttons, plus your volume controls. On the far right is where I put my "relax" button, which starts the screensaver. Except for the far right and far left buttons, each button is blacked out so all you see is the icon. No light gray for button definition. It looks way sleeker that way to me with the OLED.

I also have a second touchbar which comes up when I hit control...that touch bar has less-used items, like emojis for when I'm talking to my wife on iMessage, plus a "Goodnight" button which turns off the screen, mutes the speakers, and puts the computer in rest mode.

The possibilities are pretty endless with this thing. I did the 30 day trial and after that I spent the $7 for a license because I seriously think it's worth it. It finally made the touchbar "useful".

Better touch tool

In regards to question 2, I find Rectangle [https://rectangleapp.com/] to be a great tool to manage Windows. It basically tries to mimic the window management of Windows 10.

Also it's free and opensource.

I recently started using xmonad and I am really enjoying it. Previously, I had used awesome, but xmonad just seems cleaner. Granted, its dependencies are much heavier. I spent a long time bouncing between xmonad and awesome and decided to get some work done and just pick one. Spend few days with each, but realize that if you keep switching, neither one will feel like home.

Erm, Wayland has a working clipboard api: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ch04.html#sect-Protocol-data-sharing

> Show me that there is no discussion to be had on configurability and I will change my tune.

From the libinput FAQ:

># Can you add a configuration option for $FEATURE?

> No. At least that's going to be the initial answer. [...]

> So the answer to this question will almost always be 'no'. A configuration option is, in most cases, a cop-out.

And yes, I have read the overlong wording the author uses to justify his position (that essentially boils down to “I don't want to support it”). But the most important phrasing of note there is the arrogance behind this particular statement in the FAQ itself:

> libinput has several features that are handled automatically (and correctly) that users wanted to have configuration options for initially.

(emphasis mine). Of course, those same several features that are handled automatically and “correctly” are a continuing source of issues for a lot of users, which leads to continual changes over time (amazing how many ways you can implement some stuff, all different and all “correct”), and users finding their hardware suddenly not working anymore, and then having to backinstall older libinput versions, or change input systems (assuming they are wise enough to not having switched to Wayland yet).

> I will change my tune.

Unless you happen to be a major contributor to libinput and willing to go against the gatekeeper's will (or the gatekeeper himself), you changing your tune wouldn't really affect the situation in any significant way.

The first link looks kind of like Awesome. Not sure though. To answer your second question, Arch doesn't have a default WM/DE. You install whatever you want after setting up the initial system.

Arch Wiki: Window Managers.

"Minimizing" can be handled through the scratchpad.

Alt-tabbing is 100% possible, but no, there is no built-in binds for that (nor should there be, IMO, but that's another argument)

Keeping focus on current window when opening another is possible with the no_focus config directive (https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#no_focus)

Here's a comment I posted earlier, about terminals that support asking before pasting multiple lines:

• LilyTerm - nice terminal that has a lot of features and is easy to configure. Pretty lightweight. Asks by default IIRC.
• Urxvt - another nice terminal. Pretty popular, but harder to configure. For pasting confirmation, you need to add URxvt*perl-ext: default,confirm-paste to your .Xresources.

You'll be somewhat limited if your using something like Gnome etc, but if you went with something like i3 the sky is the limit. I'm guessing that's the porn your talking about? There are other options then i3, but that's the only window manager I've played with.

https://i3wm.org

I love i3 mainly because I'm not an expert in it. I don't have to be. I only had to learn some basics about split/stacked/tabbed containers, and figure out how to lock workspaces to specific screens, and I was ready to be productive. The online user guide is great, providing just the right amount of detail, and very well written.

If you would like to get 3 different wallpapers for each monitor, you can use DisplayFusion. It easily allows you to get different wallpapers for each monitor, but it also is able to a few more tricks that you may like.

Youtube overview: The free version likely doesn't offer most of the features, but still. This is also a very old video, it did upgrade a lot and Windows 10 obviously got a lot of these features anyway.

As far as window managers go, bspwm is lightweight and completely configured from the commandline via bspc. It's keybindings are easily configurable through sxhkd.

> OpenBox has less features than Gnome

Along some dimensions that's true, but not all dimensions. Openbox is <em>far</em> more configurable and customizable than Gnome has ever been. It's much more lightweight, but that doesn't mean its features are only a subset.

Which is why I mentioned the user guide. Read the parts 1-3 which totals ~2000 words and multiple illustrations and you'll have complete understanding of how to use i3.

Of course if you have a tech illiterate granny who has little interest in learning any keys it might be needlessly hard to try to introduce them to i3, but then again those people are probably very satisfied with touchscreen-like interface of Gnome 3.

I'm a huge fan of Spectacle.

Spectacle: It allows you to split your screen in any way you want. If you have multiple monitors, it moves the windows to other monitors in one key stroke. Super convenient when you are working with multiple windows.

neovim's terminal emulation is amazingly good. That's a solid option.

I use my window manager i3 to handle splitting non-vim windows, though.

For tmux / screen users: imagine tmux but for anything - browsers, terminals, vlc. That's i3wm.

Yes, but one time pay for all the computers in your household. It's worth the price for all the functions it has. Relieves a lot of hastle if you have a multi monitor setup. The free version misses what you want: https://www.displayfusion.com/Compare/

Sometimes they have sales, discount codes.

>Are tiling window managers worth it?

Yes. I switched to using Awesome WM about 1 year and a half ago and I have never looked back.

I used to love Gnome 2. I had 8 virtual desktops, and each served it's purpose (code, web, irc, etc). I also had a bunch of custom keybindings that could snap windows to certain portions of my screen. In essence, I was already using a tiling wm, I just didn't know it yet.

When Gnome 3 came out (or whatever flavor shipped with Fedora 16), I was horrified. They (in my own personal opinion) completely broke the virtual desktop metaphor. The whole desktop "stacking" system and application switching just felt broken to me.

This is when I switched. Previously, I would lurk in some of the screenshot threads, and it looked like people were doing some really cool things with Awesome. I installed it from the repos and started using it.

I fell in love instantly. I used 9 virtual desktops (or "tags" in Awesome's vocab), and once more there was order for my workflow(s). In my opinion, a desktop manager is doing it's job correctly when I don't notice that I'm using one. It should be as low-clutter & low-bs as possible. Awesome was able to do that for me.

That being said, there were some downsides; After ripping Gnome out of my system, I realized just how much it handled. Functionality like volume control, brightness control, battery display, & screensaver stuff had to be re-integrated. This was not too difficult, and I got to learn Lua in the process.

Overall, I highly recommend that everyone at least try Awesome. It's perfect for anyone who is looking for a highly-customizable and low-bs window manager.

http://awesome.naquadah.org/

Everyone loves screenshots: http://i.imgur.com/Gl55J.png

I use Spectacle. I usually only focus on two or three windows at a time so it's easy to move them into halves or quarters of the screen with keyboard shortcuts.

Moom is another, more advanced app for window layout, but it feels slower than Spectacle so I haven't dug into it much yet.

> What I miss most from Unity Desktop is the nice looking system tray I had

Not sure if it's "nice looking" (whatever that means) but i3 does have a system tray.

But Wayland didn't start from scratch. They've taken advantage of existing code and protocols in their design.

> Wayland is not really duplicating much work. Where possible, Wayland reuses existing drivers and infrastructure. One of the reasons this project is feasible at all is that Wayland reuses the DRI drivers, the kernel side GEM scheduler and kernel mode setting. Wayland doesn't have to compete with other projects for drivers and driver developers, it lives within the X.org, mesa and drm community and benefits from all the hardware enablement and driver development happening there.

E: Quote from Wayland FAQ

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_2

I can't talk too much about my context (aggressive NDAs), but I have a very wide picture - the software I need to support is a mix of desktops, training simulators and mobile devices. We've used X (not Xorg) for parts of this system for many many years and are in a strategic shift where alternatives are being evaluated in a methodical way. Wayland and about 6 others are on the table. The one I definitely do not want is at an advantage right now (and it's not Wayland..).

The core protocols are not as simple as you may think. They include things like dragging, dropping, minimizing, maximizing, fullscreen - you name it. See for yourself: here

> I'll probably get downvoted into oblivion, but IMO tiling WMs such as http://awesome.naquadah.org/ are the only sensible UI. I just don't get why anyone would want to spend time positioning windows.

I don't know about anyone else, but at least for me the answer to that is simple:

Because when it comes to positioning my windows, I get it right 100% of the time, and tiling WMs do not.

Every automatic tiling WM that I've used gets it "wrong" some percentage of the time, and a system that's mostly automatic but really grating when it's not is (IMHO) inferior to a system that's manual, yet not uncomfortable to use.

Ah, but why not use a manual tiling WM?

Well, I tried that. But here's the thing: I don't need to see all my windows all at once. I often want to see arbitrary combinations of parts of ones. Yes, I can do that with a tiling WM -- but keyboard shortcuts are a little cumbersome for me when compared to KWin set up the way that I want: Alt+Drag to resize, snap to window edges, desktop edge resistance, etc.

So yes, I could use a tiling WM, but it's an inferior solution for me as I'd have to spend more time managing windows only to end up with a less efficient layout.

Clickable <code>RELEASE-NOTES</code> link for the lazy

> • “resize” with pixel values now works for tiling containers

This is the big one for me, thank you!

EDIT: the --release bugfixes broke my workflow, lol. I have:

bindsym $mod+Tab workspace back_and_forth bindsym $mod+Tab --release workspace back_and_forth

Which used to mean when I let go of $mod first, it would stay on the other workspace, and when I let go of Tab first, it would return where I started. Now it returns in both cases. I'm not mad, just amused. I can still cancel the --release binding by hitting some other key, though.

The file manager could be ranger or vifm. The ascii logo with the info is archey. The window manager he is using could be ~~i3~~ dwm (as pointed out by /u/Regimardyl).

The aesthetics part is mostly show yes. It is called "ricing". Check out /r/unixporn for more information. The programs themselves are valuable, if you do not like to use your mouse (like me).

Try Display Fusion. There is a free version and a paid version. I use the free version and have been for some time. I have been really happy with it. I included a link below.

https://www.displayfusion.com/

Alright, here's the deal. By default, this is what happens:

1. There are 10 distinct workspaces, numbered 1-10.
2. Each screen is assigned one of the ten workspaces.
3. There are two ways to navigate: you can choose to focus a particular screen (via mod+w,e,r) or to focus a particular workspace (mod+1,2,...,0).
4. If you focus a particular screen, the assignment of screens to workspaces does not change, but the selected screen gets input focus.
5. If you focus a particular workspace, and that workspace is not currently visible on one of the screens, then the currently focused screen has its mapping changed to that workspace.
6. If you focus a particular workspace, and that workspace is currently visible on one of the screens, then the currently focused screen and the screen showing that workspace have their mappings swapped.

There's two common ways of tweaking this behavior. One way is to change case (6) to keep the mapping as is, but change input focus to the screen that is showing the workspace you selected. See view. The other way is to change (1) and (3) in tandem: create (10 * number of screens) workspaces, and arrange for the mod+1,2,...,0 keybindings to choose which workspace to jump to based on both which key you pressed and which screen is currently focused. The result of this modification is to create the illusion that each screen has an independent set of workspaces that never interfere with each other -- rendering case (6), the confusing case, impossible. See IndependentScreens.

The average desktop user is unlikely to care which window system they use. If you don't already have a reason to switch from one to another, then there is little to no point in switching.

There is of course no answer to your question where there is no method by which to evaluate either case, even if it was an unambiguous binary choice, but some relevant questions are answered in the Wayland FAQ.

Most folks would be advised to stick to whatever is offered by default in their desktop distribution of choice since it is likely to be the best integrated and supported. You should switch and report back on your experience.

A lot of these are pretty great applications. Under Spectacle it may be worth considering Rectangle if you're looking for an open source free alternative, though I use Magnet. https://rectangleapp.com/

Also Sublime Text is only free for evaluation purposes. It is a paid application.

It's explained in the user guide:

> The --no-startup-id parameter disables startup-notification support for this particular exec command. With startup-notification, i3 can make sure that a window appears on the workspace on which you used the exec command. Also, it will change the X11 cursor to watch (a clock) while the application is launching. So, if an application is not startup-notification aware (most GTK and Qt using applications seem to be, though), you will end up with a watch cursor for 60 seconds.

You can use workspace prev and workspace next commands. For example add this to your config:

bindsym $mod+o workspace next bindsym $mod+i workspace prev

More information here. Also you can move your cursor over the bar and use scroll wheel.

Have you seen the following link?

https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_arbitrary_commands_for_specific_windows_for_window

I use this in my i3 config:

# this works for Firefox and probably other programs too for_window [instance="^Download"] floating enable for_window [instance="^Update"] floating enable for_window [instance="^file_progress"] floating enable for_window [window_role="About"] floating enable for_window [window_role="Preferences"] floating enable for_window [window_role="^Manager"] floating enable for_window [window_role="pop-up"] floating enable

You can use xprop to get window classes, as mentioned in the guide linked above.

You can nab it on Steam pretty easy, but I do believe they used to have a free version on their main website. O-o

Looks like they still have it, but it has reduced functionality in some parts. It is a handy program and I'm pretty sure steam has included it in sales before, so you may want to hold out for it if you can live with the free version. $30 might be a bit high for a quality of life program...but I don't regret my purchase at all >_> I don't leave mine in eyefinity mode, but it's still super handy for just multiple monitors.

There's an open PR for it here, but it hasn't been merged yet. If you want to try it out you can pull Javyre's fork and build from source.

It seems to work pretty well.

yeah, the touchbar really should have been an option for Pro models and let the Pro decide if it would be useful for them or not. For some applications, like video editing, many people liked it as they could see and scrub through their timeline easily. It really depended on your use case. For casual users it might actually have been more useful, but Apple, being Apple, never gave us an option. There are some applications like BetterTouchTool which tried to make it more useful, but in the end it didn't help much for me.

All day every day with the Golden Chaos plugin for Better Touch Tool.

The preset alone is a productivity gem but it takes it up a notch with custom icons and buttons. Amazing software.

The 13" M1 isn't as bad since it's got the physical escape key. Really, the worst part about the touch bar is that in stock form it's basically useless, takes extra steps to do things - like changing volume or muting requires you to press the speaker icon, then slide a bar back and forth for volume - same thing with brightness. Plus you have no physical reference point so you've got to take your eyes off the screen to look at the touchbar.

The old version with no physical escape key was worse, because you can't just jab at escape, you have to look for it. And it would disappear and be replaced with the "make app fullscreen" button in most cases, that was just fucking aggrivating.

The only way I made it actually usable for me was bettertouchtool and the goldenchaos theme. That was a touchbar that was useful and made sense. It's the one apple should have released, bar none. I was slightly bummed to lose it when I got my new 16" m1 mbp...but not that bad.

I half think that if apple would have given the option of half-height function keys and half-height touchbar in the space where we now have full-height function keys, I would have at least considered it. But, Apple never developed or flushed out any ideas for it, sadly.

Lacks shortcuts, takes much longer to get windows sized and placed where you want, lack of usability leads to people just having windows strewn about. I lived on MacOS with the default window management system for a while and actually didn’t care until I got a windows machine for work and used theirs extensively. When I came back to my Mac, I was surprised something similar wasn’t the default and decided to download Rectangle. It’s incredible and just lets me do what I need to do faster.

I learned it a year or two ago, before I thoroughly customized I just made sure I knew enough to at least pull up firefox. Then from there I just went to https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html and kept that open for awhile until I felt comfortable enough to not need it.

The X f*ckin' Monad window manager is written in Haskell. I use it, and it's both easy to configure, and blazing fast. I also hear it didn't require much source code either.

Back then, GUI was the canonically hyped killer app for OO. But now, we have good reasons to believe FP doesn't suck at it.

Ok so you are arguing like the last 8 years of wayland development didn't happen and don't consider that wayland. Awesome. Lets take a look at the garbage wl_shell protocol that is part of "core", a useless "core" since even compositors are dropping wl_shell and wl_output but what the hell.

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/apa.html#protocol-spec-wl_shell Imagine that, it defines window management as popups. transient surfaces. fullscreen surfaces. "in move" state. in "toplevel" state. "in resize" state. in "maximized" state. in "minimized" state. The client needs to know these things so it can draw titlebar text, buttons accordingly. To decorate. The server need to be instructed about "move" and "toplevel" because it can't know if a pixel on a surface is contents, border or shadow because the client drew them, when you know, it decorated.

I use BetterTouchTool for snapping and some Touch Bar customization in macOS but there’s also a version of it just for snapping called BetterSnapTool. HIGHLY recommend it.

You could try forcing a font in your i3 config file
https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#fonts

I have San Francisco, FontAwesome and hack.
Starting i3 with lightdm.

Try the stuff from the link, if that doens't work, try lightdm?

Well, it helped me solve the same issue, so I'm glad it's here.

For the lazy:

• chapter 4.18
• chapter 6.9

The "for_window" command. Take a look at the official documentation, point 4.11 (click me!)

(Remember: you can use the "xprop" command to view infos about any window, including its class)

Use i3

Even if you want to do text only, it is nice way to have multiple things on screen that look good and is easy to navigate between. (And tiny bar above to put your stats on

And when you want to watch a movie you dont have to switch.

CLI-only might be a fun challenge, but reducing keyboard-mouse switching is actually useful for being productive.

DisplayFusion, makes having multiple monitors easier. Multiple toolbars, ability to have game still activated on 1st monitor while operating something on the second, much more. Also available in Steam.

E: am not a shill.

I was dealing with the same thing a couple of days ago.

This is due to changes to the bspc syntax.

You should find updated examples in /usr/share/doc/bspwm/examples/

pacman -S destroy-weekend :)

Downvote? Is this no longer true ( from here: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_11 )

"""How can I replace Wayland's Window Manager?

The Wayland architecture integrates the display server, window manager and compositor into one process. You can think of Wayland as a toolkit for creating clients and compositors. It is not a specific single compositor or window manager. If you want a different window manager, you can write a new one. A 'libweston' effort is underway in order to allow new environments to reuse Weston's codebase and mechanics, whilst providing their own look and feel. ""

awesome is awesome http://awesome.naquadah.org/ https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Awesome I linked archwiki because it's great even though I use Debian now, used to use arch until i had problems with wifi once. Debian's so easy. I used GNOME 3 for a few days. It was pretty. But if you got Debian + awesome + ranger? Then...

One thing I suggest you really not miss out learning are the tiling window managers like AwesomeWM. For a VIM guy like me that package is a dream. Also, don't miss freetype2-infinality. It brings the 'details and customizability' you crave to the 2nd order of magnitude in font rendering.

As a Mac guy now those are the two things I miss about Arch (GNU/Linux in general really, Arch just makes it all simple and easy).

> One thing I'd like to add is the "window snapping" feature of Windows 10. It greatly out paces the OSX alternative. I'm honestly shocked OSX is still so bad in this department vs Windows.

I'm not sure where on Reddit, but I've read like an app recommendation for Macbooks and come around to find this: Spectacle

It's 100% free to use and you can basically get the same snapping (very similar) tools that can also be found on Windows. You can customise the shortcuts to your likings and all, it's extremely useful. That said, I couldn't yet figure out if it works with mouse-snapping like on Windows, but to me personally, the keyboard shortcuts is all I need. Check it out, you might find it useful.

sort of irritating this has to exist, but i find using keyboardcleantool is helpful when it comes to cleaning your keyboard - all it does is disable the keyboard but it's handy

When I encounter this, it is always related to startup-notification, see here.

>The --no-startup-id parameter disables startup-notification support for this particular exec command. With startup-notification, i3 can make sure that a window appears on the workspace on which you used the exec command. Also, it will change the X11 cursor to watch (a clock) while the application is launching. So, if an application is not startup-notification aware (most GTK and Qt using applications seem to be, though), you will end up with a watch cursor for 60 seconds.

Are you frequently using exec to spawn applications in this manner?

Is a Windows Manager like XFWM. It's funny because I just tried it a few minutes ago for the first time over Manjaro (xfce). Seems so beatiful, but it's weird to manage as first time. I don't know if is better, maybe with practice it's is. I use this tutorial to install and configure it: https://github.com/ibrahimbutt/direwolf-arch-rice Isn't hard to configure, but you need some minutes to do it. Try it in a Virtual Machine and maybe it will convince you.

Edit: You need this to manage the windows: https://i3wm.org/docs/refcard.html

You do move them around with your keyboard, but it’s extremely simple and efficient; you can find a couple of images showing the default keybindings here. You can easily learn it in less than a minute. I’ve actually found it way more simple than those of desktop environments’.

Pros: It’s extremely simple, efficient, customizable and lightweight. You can also do everything from your keyboard, which is a huge pro for me.

Cons: Can’t really think of much. I guess some people want a desktop environment, and, well, this isn’t one. And most people are only familiar with one, so if a friend tries to use your computer, they probably won’t have any idea how to use it.

There is a bit more to it than multiple taskbars, but that's definitely the main appeal. If you feel like deep diving, there is a ton of customization you can do such as custom triggers when opening applications and wallpaper tweaks. For ~$7 it's absolutely worth it.

Download the app Rectangle. It's free, open source, and brings Windows' window management to the mac. I've got a MBA for work and a Windows machine for gaming, and I feel right at home on my MBA :)

Also, as for browsers -- I really can't do Safari or Chrome, so I use Firefox on my mac. It works like a charm and has full extension support; Safari is missing some vital extensions I use, and Chrome I just don't use out of principle (and it sucks battery on my 2015 MBP)

The JVM has a hardcoded whitelist of window managers that it expects. This can be spoofed by setting it to "LG3D" using something like http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Hooks-SetWMName.html

if it's old hardware, a WM without a DE is very lightweight.

my personal favorite is xmonad (haskell ftw). but openbox is what I would recommend for your use case

Okay. I strongly recommend awesome as a tiling window manager. It's configurable as hell and pretty light on resources. It can also be controlled entirely by keyboard (or entirely by mouse).

It also provides most of the (important) features of a DE out-of-the-box: a "bar" with menus and a system tray, lots of configurable keyboard shortcuts, and support for floating windows. (note: most tiling WMs provide these things)

Things not provided in a WM that a DE does include:

• GUI "control panels" and configuration editors
• File browser
• probably some other stuff that I've never missed.

If you can manage your system by editing config files rather than using GUIs, you shouldn't miss anything when you switch to a WM rather than a DE.

And yes, any good WM, even tiling ones, have no issue with any kind of graphical application including NetBeans.

Edit: I see you are just now switching to Linux? Well, I know when I switched to Linux it was because I was tired of slow-and-relatively-inefficient Windows. I fell in love with the command line and the huge boosts in efficiency that it granted some tasks. However, I was turned off by the whole Gnome vs. KDE thing -- KDE was buggy and confusing and Gnome had about as many options as a Safeway dishwasher. It wasn't until I switched to a tiling WM that I really felt like I was running a clean, efficient, powerful machine.

For your intended question: if you filter out "User" related entries, and set the timeframe far back enough (I used 365 days), you'll see that the last edit to the Wiki was on 1 May 2018.

http://openbox.org/oldwiki/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&amp;limit=1000&amp;days=365&amp;namespace=2&amp;invert=1

> The only annoyance I had with OpenBox was the lack of a proper menu (i.e. not by editing menu.xml by hand), but I am pretty sure there are some other options for dynamic menus.

Pipe menus have been around since forever. I haven't touched mine since 2014, still works fine.

You could add the following to your ~/.i3/config (order is important):

for_window [class=".*"] floating enable for_window [class="^chromium$"] floating disable

This enables floating for every window class, but disables it again for the class "chromium".

But this is not what i3 was designed for. The only reason floating window are even supported is because sometime there is no way around them: dialog windows would be quite annoying and some applications just cannot (do not want to) be resized arbitrarily. This is reflected in a rather poor support for floating windows: new floating windows may open below existing ones, only one floating layer (no "always on top" or similar), no sticky borders, and so on.

If you intend to make extensive use of floating windows, almost to the total exclusion of tiled windows, then i3 is in all likelihood not the WM you are looking for. It may work for specific use cases, perhaps some kiosk application. But in general, especially for use as an environment for working, I would suggest using some stacking window manager that allows you to put chromium below any other window and maximize it - maybe openbox? - instead of (ab)using i3 in a way, for which it clearly is not designed.

TL;DR: Don't!

• You ever had text that you wanted to magically make all capital letters or vice versa? Highlight some text, right click, then look for Transformation. Ta da!

• Free app for window snapping (because it’s not a natively built in option, there is a two-window split but it’s a little awkward to use).

https://www.spectacleapp.com

• Say goodbye to window start menu and say hello to spotlight (command+space)

• Check out hot corners.

• You can rename files while it’s still open.

• Screen record with QuickTime player. You can also connect a mobile device and stream your device’s screen onto your computer.

• Enjoy a Unix based terminal that is finitely more powerful than Window’s command prompt. There is a mild learning curve to it, but you can download and install many things that way.

• Quickly preview your files by clicking on them and then pressing the space bar. Makes looking at code super easy. Also click on a file, then press shift+command+c and paste into Preview. You will be able to the file’s icon image that way.

• If you want to install an app, either go through the installer or click and drag the app (after it unpackages) and move it into the Applications folder. To uninstall, simply click and drag the app into the trash bin (or right click and click move to trash). Simple as that.

• Spend some time in the System Preferences menu. You can learn a lot about Macs just by being there and tinkering around.

I used to be a Windows sysadmin who now works in Mac environments as a DevOps engineer. Love everything about Macs now. Let me know if you have any questions.

It is very different. There is no maximize and window tiling is only in that full screen mode.

I install a little utility app called BetterTouchTool which allows for key combinations to pin a window left/right/top/bottom, half screen, full screen...but not full screen the way OS X does it, just filling the current view.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204172

Short answer, use a damp microfiber cloth and a dry microfiber cloth. Never use anything besides water… no alcohol, no wonder, nothing but water.

I also use KeyboardCleanTool. Allows you to lock the keyboard while cleat your MacBook. It’s my favorite price, free.

https://folivora.ai/keyboardcleantool/

> 2- The Touch Bar. I don't benefit from the extra functionality at all. Actually the opposite. I feel like it's making me less productive.

Get BetterTouchTool. Apple should buy it and implement it, but of course never will, because MacBook Pro devices are meant for simple consumers (just like the iPhone) and not for professionals.

Why would you pay $8 for something so simple that an open source app does for free? It's Mac, you're not limited just to the app store.

https://rectangleapp.com/ is a lovely free alternative and is open source, so at least you can be sure that the app isn't doing anything fishy in the background.

Source code : https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle

it sounds like i3 is working sort of, and you either have it configured wrongly, or you don't know how to use i3.

win+enter or alt+enter may open a terminal.

look here..

https://i3wm.org/docs/refcard.html

the [1] at the bottom left is i3 showing you are on desktop 1.

the bottom right, is the status command feature in i3 that seems to be missconfigured.

if you log out via the proper i3 key combo you can select a different desktop on the login screen. or you can kill the x session via the console.

alt+shift+e or win+shift+e

do not use the automatic login feature, you sort of painted yourself into a corner with that.

and stop using the term 'brick', you are using it wrong.

summary:

disable auto login.

learn how to configure and use i3

stop using the word 'brick'

ʘ‿ʘ

oh. by default i3 is using a black wallpaper it seems..

Your tray_output primary should be on the next line.

Take a look at the documentation for status_command and for tray_output.

I had a multi-monitor setup at my workstation at my last job, but lately I just use a 15" laptop for all my development. I know this is a personal preference thing, but I've become convinced that you can work just as efficiently with a single monitor than with multiple monitors as long as you have decent screen resolution and develop the right workflow. I use the i3 window manager (my tiling WM of choice) with emacs as my text editor for almost all my development, but any sort of keyboard-driven environment that provides an efficient mechanism to switch between different applications and window layouts is at least worth consideration.

I've never missed the 2nd monitor--in many ways it's actually been more convenient and comfortable for me without it. In practice it takes me less time to press a hotkey or whatever than it would for me to physically turn my head to a 2nd monitor.

Anyway I don't know if that's helpful at all. Just trying to provide some alternative perspectives :) I used to be all about these really complex and fancy setups but now I follow some kind of "less is more" philosophy.

I use displayfusion to handle my monitors. It has this feature built in. You can take a snapshot of your favorite positions and apps. Then made it a keyboard shortcut or titlebar button.

link: DisplayFusion

Most X11 deployments use libinput these days and Wayland doesn't even handle input (to the best of my knowledge) and again most compositors just use libinput.

Libinput seems to use device specific acceleration:

> libinput uses device-specific pointer acceleration > methods, with the default being the Linear pointer > acceleration. > > The methods share common properties, such as Velocity > calculation. > > This page explains the high-level concepts used in the > code. It aims to provide an overview for developers and is > not necessarily useful for users.

In the end it's all about how to present it to the the user in a digestible way.

Take a look at the release notes: with this version, i3 switches its build system from autotools to meson.

In case you’re unfamiliar, check out https://i3wm.org/docs/hacking-howto.html#_building_i3

I try not to. The servers I need to SSH into usually have a tmux session running or if not, I want one to be immediately started, so that I could pick up my work where I left off (join back to watch some lengthy process, manage my torrents, etc.).

If I were to use a host tmux split and SSH into my server in a split then I would end up <C-b><C-b>ing constantly and also would lose track of where I am logged in to which servers.

Instead of that, I use a tiled window manager (bspwm) and instead of a new host tmux split I create a new split on my desktop to spawn another terminal, and have the remote tmux running there.

Ew sounds clumsy, huh? No.

Let's say I use a server to run my irc client (which I did).

1. add to your .bashrc: alias irc="ssh irc.kmarc.me -t 'tmux attach -t kmarc || tmux new -s kmarc'" - with this alias, I just need to type in irc and I'll be brought to my session automatically
2. add to your hotkey config (in my case it's sxhkd): super + space; i urxvtcd -ls -e bash -ci 'irc' - with this hotkey combo, I need press Win button and space (like in MacOS's spotlight) and then immediately key i and a new window will be created.

If I need to ssh ad hoc, I'll press Win+Enter to spawn a new terminal.

I have my dotfiles on github, probably I should polish them and have a blogspot about how to configure this kind of tiled-window tiled-terminal workflow :-)

I can think of at least two options for you:

1. Write some keybinds to detect the current workspace and move in a way that simulates moving on a 2D grid. Like, if you have 9 workspaces and are on #3, and you hit your "down" keybind, it would move to #6 instead of #4.

2. If you want a visual representation, look at GridSelect in the contrib extensions. That'll let you pop them up in a 2D grid for navigation.

The missing feature is called "coasting" or "kinetic scrolling". And I agree it sucks when it doesn't work.

Recent Ubuntu based distros use libinput as their touchpad driver. Older versions of Ubuntu used the Synaptics driver. Synaptics implemented coasting but it had a quirk. Suppose in Firefox you start a scroll so it coasts and then go to press ctrl+tab to switch tabs. As soon as ctrl is pressed the current page zooms out. This is because the touchpad driver is still sending a scroll signal to the app, so it executes the ctrl+scroll down function which is zoom out.

libinput is a newer driver. They implemented coasting the "proper" way, which requires application support. If apps don't support coasting with libinput you get no coasting at all. It does fix the quirk of Synaptics. Over time more apps will get support for coasting, either natively or by being based on a UI framework that has support.

I find so few apps currently have coasting support it's too painful to run libinput. So I install the old Synaptics driver, xserver-xorg-input-synaptics. In a few years libinput support may be widespread enough to make it worthwhile.

I run Kubuntu LTS. Perhaps more up to date distros, especially rolling release distros will have newer versions of apps with better coasting support.

I highly suggest awesome. Your config is coded in simple lua, the dynamic workspace plugin is beautiful, and the wiki has lots of good tips.

This can definitely be done. Check out the documentation here under the section titled "Layout Modification". There may already be a layout which does what you want, I don't recall off the top of my head. I used a similar layout (left 2/3 was web browser, right 1/3 was two terminals) back when I had awesome installed. I was a newbie back then so the layout likely already existed ;)

BetterTouchTool to customise trackpad gestures, mouse buttons, window snapping.

I love itsycal! Glad to see a lot of you enjoy it. How the hell is this not a native feature is beyond me.

You can add something like this to ~/.config/i3/config

for_window [class=".*"] resize set width 33 ppt

You can find more resizing options here.

> I think I have something in my i3 config file that's causing a glitch, because when I login to i3, I'll get a spinning cursor like it's loading something, but the loading cursor lasts forever.

You're probably executing a script that does not support startup notifications without using --no-startup-id. From the i3 docs:

> The --no-startup-id parameter disables startup-notification support for this particular exec command. With startup-notification, i3 can make sure that a window appears on the workspace on which you used the exec command. Also, it will change the X11 cursor to watch (a clock) while the application is launching. So, if an application is not startup-notification aware (most GTK and Qt using applications seem to be, though), you will end up with a watch cursor for 60 seconds. [Source]

The i3wm User's Guide for one. /u/addy-fe made a i3 Starterpack you might be interested in if you are looking for an example.

Keyboard, keyboard, keyboard! The road to enlightenment is paved with learning or creating shortcuts for anything you use more than a few times a day.

This includes shell aliases. Who's lazy enough to alias vim to v? This guy. (I don't think the single-character namespace on shells is empty for no reason)

But even more importantly, tiling window managers. I don't know anyone who has gone back after climbing the -admittedly steep- learning curve.

In tiling WMs, you delegate window movement/placement do the keyboard. There are usually three modes:

• Split - horizontally or vertically
• Tabbed - As browser tabs [Also stacked: vertical tabs]
• Floating - floating over other windows

My WM of choice has been i3 for years. The idea is that you start simple and progressively adapt it to your liking. Everything I do frequently (and not) is mapped to keyboard shortcuts. Great docs, great community.

Alternatives: Xmonad, AwesomeWM

(Not exactly an answer to you question, but still hope it's helpful)

If I were you I would check out a tiling window manager like i3 (https://i3wm.org). It's a bit daring to begin with, but the documentation of i3 is awesome. This will basicly give you what you are looking for, e.g. using Alt+2 to move to workspace 2. Each workspace can then hold one a several open windows.

I know it's not exactly what you're asking, but personally I can't imagine working on a non-tiling workspace now that I'm used to it. Using the keys for everything is the whole idea of these window managers, and it have greatly improved my workflow.

Hm that is i3..

Edit: Here you can find the user guide. It's best to read through it. You can quit a session with Mod+Shift+e by default. Here is the rest of the default keybindings.

Refering to https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#keybindings you could use something like bindsym $mod+caret. You can use xev to see the actual name of the key. (I cannot be more precise as I'm currently running wayland-only setup).

You need to remove the $ from the line, it just shows that the command should be run as user, not as root.

For ricing i3, it's not really that hard. Most things that you'd be looking for is changing i3's colors together with your terminal colors. Here's a link of the i3 documentation on how to do that, I can't help you with your terminal, but seeing as most people use rxvt, this page should help you along.

Just ask if you need more assistance, I'll be glad to give it to you.

Specifically, DisplayFusion's Dual Screen Screensaver.

If you really want to get detailed, transparent screen savers. the security of locking your PC with the productivity of a monitor.

You'll need two programs for this: one to control the audio and one to control the video. For audio I suggest SoundSwtich. Just tell it which audio devices you want to cycle through and give it a cycle command. I use Alt+Ctrl+Home. It's complexity means that I'll never accidentally trigger it with the keyboard. For video you can use Windows + P to bring up a menu with display options but I would suggest DisplayFusion to do this stuff automatically. Then just assign whatever hotkeys/commands to your Steam Chord binding and you'll have access to these functions regardless of binding. You'll just hold the Guide button and then press whichever button you assigned the hotkeys to.

We rely on 3rd party libraries/drivers to handle mouse input. As far as I know, none of them support customizing the curve beyond choosing whether or not to have mouse acceleration enabled at all. Here's what libinput does (the default on most distros these days): https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/pointer-acceleration.html