autotiling VS river

Check out https://github.com/nwg-piotr/autotiling I think I even left the configuration as is and the tiling is much better now.

autotiling --limit 2 is close enough https://github.com/nwg-piotr/autotiling

If you do want some "smart" behaviour as to how a new window will split automatically, try the autotiling script.

https://github.com/nwg-piotr/autotiling does it work for you?

Autotiling for i3 and Sway

Original depth limit feature contributed to the Autotiling repository by @Syphdias.

If you want to stay on sway you can try autotiling.

Have tried lots of window managers including awesome, but there's always something annoying that sends me back to i3. I use this to solve the problems you're referring to: https://github.com/nwg-piotr/autotiling

I settled on river¹ after a couple of decades with awesomewm. Tiling and tagging work in a way you'd expect coming from awesomewm, but nothing else does. I made my mind up because having to use workspaces and manual tiling is a far harder sell than implementing the functionality I want on top of a decent base.

If anything it reminds me more of the experience with using awesome v2(before lua); you generate a config file for the base WM, and then build up external tooling to drive it how you see fit. The experience has been quite pleasant, but I do enjoy twiddling.

¹ https://codeberg.org/river/river

I think Wayland is basically waiting for a higher level abstraction to catch on, at least for the desktop. I'm currently playing with the River Wayland compositor (https://codeberg.org/river/river) which separates the window manager from the compositor and I think it could fill this gap left in the transition. Not as sure about non-toolkit (gtk,qt) application development...

https://github.com/riverwm/river#future-plans

More info on the wiki https://github.com/riverwm/river/wiki

Here is the related github issue

If you can get past some minor wayland related annoyances, river is pretty easy imo, you can write a config in whatever format you want, it just needs to be an executable file, the most common type is a shell script. The actual configuration happens by calling the riverctl program from the file, which from what I've heard is a similar method compared to bspwm.

Coming from awesome you may find river more to your liking than sway.

River crashed everytime I closed Chromium. The developer fixed it in 5 minutes :)

I've written a plugin that implements the river-layout-v3 wayland protocol in Hyprland. This means you can run something like rivertile, river-luatile, rivercarro or kile as a layout provider.

Author here. And yeah, as of 0.6.0 it supports master stack - I just called it stack main. I was in fact inspired by river: https://github.com/riverwm/river. River is really promising but is still in very early development. Sway on the other hand has been around for a long time and I, for now, prefer that stability.