The Dank Case For Scrolling Window Managers
17 points by calvin
17 points by calvin
But [PaperWM] had a problem: It was attached to GNOME, with all the extra cruft that implies
Ehh, the problem is that scrolling is kind of a massive paradigm shift, and if your window manager wasn't actually built to accomodate this kind of thing, bolting it on in an extension is inherently janky. Niri handles this paradigm perfectly unlike any GNOME/KDE/macOS/Windows/… implementation because Niri was made entirely with it in mind :)
I've been playing with Dank Linux on my laptop for a few weeks now, and it's actually pretty great. Not flawless, it does feel young and imperfect at times, but it's still an extremely good integrated-but-lightweight desktop environment. It hits my personal sweet spot enough that I'm starting to ponder submitting bug reports and PR's.
I'd like to try one of these one day, but for now, I can't afford to have any bugs in my window manager and I'm afraid that anything new or regularly updated will inevitably have bugs. I've been using i3 for more than a decade (since Feb 2015) and I've never encountered a bug.
Stop making me want to change my habits.
I tried Niri and I find it fascinating but it breaks my brain. I think I will forever be happiest with xmonad-style workspace switching unless I'm mostly using a mouse and not the keyboard.
It’s interesting: the first time I used PaperWM it just clicked for me. I still use a floating WM from time to time, but I just don’t see going back to that model again. Other tiling WMs don’t work well for me either. To each their own, it’s great we have so many choices.
One thing I didn't realize at first about niri that made the process of switching from sway easier is that you can still have "named" workspaces that always exist. So on my sway setup I would have workspace 1 as my "random stuff" workspace, 2 for chat programs, 3 for code, 6 for my music player. I was able to replicate this in niri just fine.
So this is basically a bit of tiling plus the old FVWM/Amiga scrolled desktop?
Sort of. Not really. Imagine that each workspace is a length of film, and each frame on the film strip is one of your application windows. You can resize any window's width, or swap their places on the film strip, and you can slide the film strip left or right to reveal other windows. Your focused window is always entirely on screen, but may have others partly or entirely visible on the left or right depending on size. You can also stack windows into columns, but I rarely do this. Each film strip is arbitrarily long, but a fixed height (that of your screen, maybe minus a panel or bar). The workspaces are like separate film strips lined up above and below each other. You can switch between them, and move windows between them.
There was a design demo that came some time before PaperWM, but it was never directly implemented.
I love Niri, and previously used PaperWM. I keep running into Quickshell, and then running away because it's too overwhelming to approach. Some of these pre-made Quickshell stacks look nice, but they're also a little curl | bash for me. If I can't install distro packages, I want to at least git pull && make install. A Flatpak would be fine, too, assuming this kind of thing could actually be built as a Flatpak.
Interestingly, most of the Cosmic desktop components mostly work under Niri. Not well enough to replace my current setup, but enough to try out. I'd really feel a lot safer using Cosmic components than a pile of Quickshell mods.
ironbar offers the same basic flexible interactive UI dynamically built from your config but from a much more minimalist starting point.It won't do nearly as much but might also be more approachable.
Thanks, I'll have to look at it. I have a minimalist-but-adequate and aesthetically pleasing Waybar setup, but I'm open to change!