Tiling Window Managers - My 15 Month Journey

I first started using Tiling Window Managers around 15 months ago and I thought it was high time I took you through a whistle stop tour of my journey with them.
I've mentioned most of the TWMs I've used along the way, but now I have experienced quite a few of these I feel I'm finally in a position
to give my overall opinion
This is a bit of ramble really, and it's likely to be the last one for a while. Watch for the announcement at the end!
I hope you enjoy the video :-)
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Ramble On!

[@TheChrissutcliffe]

Nice vid which has given me food for thought as I have just embarked on my Tiling Window manager journey. I'm glad you are back producing videos I watch them as a nice little comfort break with a cup of coffee on a weekend.

[@derekr54]

See when you have time Steve,your house,family and the Royal Enfield come first mate.Take care and stay safe.

[@taidee]

Wonderful growth you've gone through OTB, quite impressive. As I've said before, I'm a Qtile resident myself, and yes it was because of battling with Xmonad, lol. We understand man, go enjoy good weather meet other people, you have laid down a good foundation for the rest of us to learn from.

[@petersoderman92]

I will miss your weekly uploads Steve, but taking time off for family and friends are signs of healthy priorities. Our loved ones comes first. Stay safe m8!

[@johanb.7869]

50 hours a week. I work 32.5 since around 3 years now. More than enough for me being 61. Good luck with all the chores and enjoy the good weather on the bike while it lasts.

[@deechvogt1589]

Thanks for the Window Manager round-up journey. Enjoy the new bike, catching up with real world people, and the weather. We'll see you when we see you. Until then, stay well!

[@khantutan825]

One of the most underrated tiling windows manager is WMFS. Highly configurable, versatile, feature rich, resource friendly and extremely snappy. Combined WMFS and Pentadactyl and you got yourself productivity with the speed of thought.

[@andrewpalm2103]

Thanks for this interesting tour of your TWM journey, OTB! I've used I3, Qtile, and HerbstluftWM, the last of which was my favorite of the three. However, after considerable effort developing my config files for these (plus Openbox and ICEwm), I realized that I had made them all more or less equivalent to an Xfce desktop. Then I took a deep dive into Gnome, but added extensions to make it more like Xfce. I finally got the message--I like Xfce DE the most. End of story? Well, now Wayland is coming to the fore and I wonder what the future will hold for Xfce. I suppose KDE would be the logical path forward, but I'm in my mid-70s and no longer have the energy (physical or mental) to deal with a bazillion optional adjustments. Oh no ... I may end up in Gnome once more! Again, thanks for all your informative videos. Cheers from Wisconsin!

[@limpa756]

There’s custom gnome tiling shells!

[@goldilockszone4389]

You are an inspiration, old man. Keep it going

[@RobBoudreau]

Love your honesty and enthusiasm Steve, always have. Personally, I settled on bspwm about 5-6 years ago now, and it's where I spend most of my time. I found I like manual tilers better than stacking ones, though I still dabble with Awesome from time to time. Tried most of the others over the years, but always come back to bspwm. I suppose I'm just a creature of habit. Enjoy the friends, family, bike and the weather, summers are too short to spend more than necessary inside. Stay safe and have fun. Cheers!

[@DannyMexen9]

Been a while since I last watched your videos, great topic to jump back in. Stay safe.

[@StrelokRadist]

So far my favorite is "bismuth" package (actually script) for KDE Plasma.

[@rauljosegarcia]

You've learned quite a few new tricks! Thanks for the video.

[@borise4104]

Very interesting! Thank you!

[@voidspawn2351]

6:39 the -s flag is for swap .. in bspwm the screen is position as it see them in the world, so 1 2 3 4 5 is on the screen to the left and the rest to the right but the swap ..well swap them so 1 2 3 4 5 go to the right

[@russellrussell5495]

AwesomeWM is pretty much the only one I've been able to get my head around. Installed it on MX-Linux and used as a replacement WM for Xfwm window manager.

[@syrefaen]

Really cool video! Ive tried most of them, dwm is also one of my favorites. I'm on one of those with wayland as default now.

[@theplaymakerno1]

I wish my life was as organized as some of these tiling Window Managers :/

[@ronfiv9918]

Just Subscribed , this is the second vid of yours i have seen it is now Nov 10 2021 but windows or microsoft has finally pushed me over the edge and have been consuming every video i can find on Linux zorin os mostly as that looks to be the one i will switch to ...thanks for a great vid

[@OldTechBloke]

Thanks Ron

[@Basheski]

EndeavourOS + sway here... I went for full Wayland-thing... but now I'm tempted to try out LeftWM, since I already use Alacritty, paru, starship, ripgrep, just, and other rust-based tools... and also recently discovered 'i3status-rust' which I wanted to replace my waybar with... just as experiment! But indeed, the most time for configuring my current setup was the bar!! Damn, those are time sinkers...

[@diegonayalazo]

Thanks

[@armynyus9123]

25:37 - colors in bar slowing DWM down - THIS. I had exactly the same, thought I made an error while patching or so, could not believe it. Sort of good to know that it was not only me ;-) It all ended with me adding a patch for dwm, so that I can use xfce4 panel. Now I'm super happy with it, nearly transparent full status bar with systray, not distracting, opaque on hover. Interactive. Not much xfce4 deps. Perfect.

[@xunyl87]

Hi there, Arch + Sway here. I literally love Sway, it's the one for me

[@ReloadedK]

I've been using kde plasma with a certain kwin script called quarter tiling. It fits all my needs regarding window management, but of course I tried my fair share of twm as well. Kinda wish quarter tiling and automatic window-to-workspace launching and following every 4 windows per screen was a thing, although admitedly, it is very specific

[@charliekahn4205]

By twm do you mean raw Xorg or Trinity?

[@noblesavage149]

Used tiling wms on and off (mostly on) for about, hmmm, 4 years I think? Starting to go to xfce as, unless I'm mistaken, the only things tiling wms give are tiling placement, and keybinds. Both of which are available in the desktop environments. Maybe I'm missing something? Also, writing posix/bash scripts to automate, and using tmux kinda takes care of anything tiling wms do. Qtile has been my main choice though. Hope you have a good break

[@themroc8231]

Hey OTB. Take all the time you need, I am glad you can catch up with your folks and make up for lost time. Those are the things that matter. Tell me, I was thinking maybe you could help me with a question I had: It seems like everybody always makes very good reviews of SpectrWM saying how it's very capable, ridiculously easy to configure, written in the language of the gods (c), etc... And I feel like no one ever complains about it, or maybe to say that the bar is not as easy to configure as the rest but not much else. But then it's like no one ever sticks with it. Is there something I am missing? You say you later felt the call of WM hopping and that's why you changed, but is there another reason why you didn't stick to it?

[@micaiahflores1592]

I actually really like sway on my pine book pro I think I might put that on my main production machine

[@SuryaAnggraito]

I still use i3wm on manjaro until today, and i love it, even when i start move to debian linux.

[@voidspawn2351]

i try qtile but the keybindings was not global and got pick up by programs and not qtile and did not do the thing i wanted .. ex super+q while in firefox did not close firefox but did close termite but not alacritty ... and super+1 did not work while in termite but did work in firefox, but all of them work fine if i did not focus any window. ... and this was with DT's config too ... and no help on google.... xmonad, i3, bspwm, awesomewm work fine for me ... but bspwm is the one for me

[@henryt9871]

I use tiling windows manager for work and usually i code on Java. So far only i3 satisfied me, then bspwm with some tweaks, but dwm not working at all and I don’t know why , even though patching is fun but doesn’t mean anything if you couldn’t use it

[@cstephan7]

Hey, Steve. 2 things. First, your videos on spectrwm helped me land in spectrwm many months ago. Second, you mentioned struggling with a bar in spectrwm. The developers know that the situation with spectrwm not being fully compatible with lemonbar, polybar, or other panels is a bit of a challenge, but I do not think that it is a high priority to change things. Why? Well, as you show here, spectrwm's built-in bar is powerful in its own right. The easiest, most cross-platform/portable way to display system information in the spectrwm bar is actually to pull from conky's console output mode, and graphical icons can be displayed with any Nerd Font.

[@charliekahn4205]

Fvwm has its own problems with bars, but I get Tint2 to work anyway.

[@voidspawn2351]

i use arch/bspwm btw

[@carlitosbll]

I use archlinux + i3

[@peterjansen4826]

You shouldn't need two times 2 second sleep for starting up polkit and nitrogen. Some people need 1 second, 2 should be overkill. I don't even use sleep when I start up dwm (xinitrc).

[@OldTechBloke]

It was trial and error mate. This worked for me

[@peterjansen4826]

​@@OldTechBloke As long as you don't care about the system starting up slower it is fine. :)

[@henninb]

Xmonad does it for me

[@voidspawn2351]

@Donald Mickunas bspwm is the one :)

[@henninb]

@Donald Mickunas i like bspwm too.

[@pinpox]

Next up: awesomeWM, it can do anything you want.

[@charliekahn4205]

It's a Lua interpreter with X bindings. Just like Xmonad is a Haskell interpreter with X bindings. And Emacs is a Lisp interpreter with shell bindings.

[@tonywise198]

Interesting video, although I have to say, I just could not be bothered with all of this. I have too much real work to do rather than faff about with an OS to this extent. Enjoy life , the universe and everything (42) in the meantime!

[@brianfristensky521]

I had never heard of "tiling window managers" before, and expected this video to answer the following questions: 1. What is a TWM? 2. Why is it useful? How does it make me more productive, or make certain types of work more efficient? 3. What does it look like in action? 4. What makes your favorite TWM better than the others? Almost the entire video consisted of voice over an empty screen background, the face of the presenter, or editing a config file, whose attributes were not explained. For example, set an attribute, and then show us what would be different about the look or behavior of the TWM. I would also say that this video broke an important rule, which is " prepare first, shoot second", so that the video is shorter and doesn't waste the viewer's time. After this video, I still don't really know how one defines a TWM, or why it is better than other types of window managers.

[@MarkFendl]

Interesting point of view Brian… but this is about his 15 month journey with TWMs, his experiences with TWMs, what he liked about each ,how difficult ir was to config each, etc. No where does it indicate it is a TWM tutorial, how to specifically configure any of them, even that it will explain what a TWM is. There are tons of videos addressing those topics on KZbin for more information on that subject matter, I appreciated his ‘ramblings’ about his experiences, it gives some guidance on choosing one (or more) to try once you have a better handle on what a TWM is and how to use it.

[@Sean_476]

Agreed Mark. Agreed. Instead off shit talking about what the video wasn't, why didn't you just research what you were really looking for? If you ca t research this kind of stuff in Arch wiki, uhmmm probably shouldn't be using TWM...just sayin