Grid-Tiling-Kwin VS bismuth

KWin used to have no tiling capabilities at all and people came up with lots of add-on scripts like kwin-tiling, Grid-Tiling-KWin, Krohnkite, Bismuth and so on. This gave users tiling, but it was always a bit hackish, getting KWin to do something it wasn't designed to do.

Grid-Tiling-Kwin

Personally I use Grid-Tiling-Kwin, which is working great with Wayland. Not sure why it won't allow more than 2 splits horizontally/2 splits vertically, though.

I only had issues a few times when installing new theme or icons. Desktop widgets might sometimes move a bit after restart, other than that it works well. I also use https://github.com/lingtjien/Grid-Tiling-Kwin

For starters, there is a couple of tiling scripts for KWin (Kröhnkite and Grid-Tiling). You can also turn any EWMH-compliant WM into a tiling one with PyTyle.

Also have noticed that when a notification shows up, an entry on the window list plasmoid shows up too - so it could be that they got kind of a regular window behavior somehow. This behavior is reported in bug #411462, which I think is the cause of another issue I'm having (using Grid-Tiling-Kwin and when opening a plasmoid, it wants to fill a space as if it were a regular window, and it messes up with the layout of previously opened windows) but am not sure if it's related to the focus stealing issue.

Note that there are at least other alternative. Maybe not as powerful as I imagine Bismuth/Krohnite is, the one I use, [Grid-tiling-kwin](https://github.com/lingtjien/Grid-Tiling-Kwin) (though it's being funny lately with Wayland and not sure why)

Perhaps a working kwin script - for example, I use Grid-Tiling-Kwin and for some reason while in use it keeps rewriting that file.

Tiling window managers take a lot of time to learn and configure, and typically require configuration through text files. I would not recommend starting with a true tiling WM. You can use System76's Pop tiling GNOME extension, which still allows you to use the mouse to drag windows as well as add tiling exceptions, or you can install KDE and use Grid-Tiling-KWin. Krohnkite also works, but it might be a little too advanced. Grid-Tiling allows you to meta-drag windows around to change their positions rather than relying entirely on keyboard shortcuts, just like the Pop tiling.

What level are you interested in scripting? In KDE Plasma you can interact with the desktop UI via JS: https://develop.kde.org/docs/plasma/scripting/

And then for something more sophisticated there are extensions like https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth.

It does all feel a little disorganized/wild-west-y compared to say, a .vimrc with a list of plugins and bindings, which is something that makes a system like Nix (or a fully containerized DE of some kind) appealing

It had, but they are all dead until ported to the new kde 6.

https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth/issues/471#issuecom...

This is what I used. I found no good replacement for it and that is what made me switch to hyprland.

one thing i would totally recommend for kde is bismuth https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth/

it's tiling for kde and it works REALLY well.

Take a look at a tiling window solution. I'm currently using bismuthwith gives similar arrangement to what you're looking for and helps massively with productivity when working on an ultrawide

As a good halfway house you could do worse than KDE with Bismuth (https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth), which is an add-in that will give you great tiling capability, fully controllable via the keyboard. Couple this with KDE native virtual desktops and you have a pretty decent tiling window manager.

Plasma 5.27 added in some native tiling support. There are also some kwin scripts available to add tiling to it.

https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth

Not-good stuff: This tiling is very incomplete. It doesn't allow you to snap everything to your tiles at once, it doesn't support different tiles per virtual screen/workspace and, perhaps more importantly, with that addition and Plasma 6 on the way, compatibility with Bismuth and similar addons is getting lost.

Since you are already using KDE, you can very easily try how much you like tiling: just install bismuth: https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth It's a plasma add-on that enables tiling in KDE. If you don't like tiling, just disable the plugin again and uninstall bismuth.

No, it doesn't have that. Here is the list of layouts.

No I was talking about Bismuth which was amazing and actively maintained but due to kwin updates it's not working and is apparently not going to be updated