bismuth VS Exquisite

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

If it matters, the script is https://store.kde.org/p/1852610/ / https://github.com/qewer33/Exquisite.

Would recommend this https://github.com/qewer33/Exquisite

I tried two tiling tools, Exquisite and Bismuth, but neither seems to be right for me. Mainly because they don't seem to work well on two screens.

Not sure if you know Exquisite, it has a layout switch and work with modifier keys. https://github.com/qewer33/Exquisite

Do you mean something like Fancyzones? If so, have you checked this out? Combined with this would be what you meant, right?

ThereIs Exquisite , but it's still in beta

This looks cool! Perhaps you could combine efforts with Exquisite to support arbitrary layouts?

Exquisite https://github.com/qewer33/Exquisite

For a tiling assistant window, you can use Exquisite, and for a more full auto-tiling experience you can use Bismuth, as others have suggested.