bspwm VS herbstluftwm

Over on Linux, I’ve been learning kinda a-lot about linux tools and workflows. I've recently got into window managers, bspwm was my first one and I'm thinking of moving towards a Arch+Hyprland setup in future. Setting it up was way easier than I thought, and I got inspired by a YouTuber named jvscholz, who’s all about minimalism and productivity.

The biggest QOL improvements imo are found in the approach to the user-facing API design.

Compare basic multi-monitor commands in something like bspwm[1] or yabai[2][3] to twms on Windows where this is typically handled transparently by directional `move` and `focus` commands understanding monitor boundaries.

Besides this, Whim has implemented a very functional ctrl+p style command palette which provides a great interface for more advanced on-the-fly/one-time window manager interactions.

With komorebi I think that having different border colours to indicate different types of containers is very helpful (one colour for single window stacks, a different colour for monocle containers, a different colour for stacks with multiple windows), as well as custom window-based work area offsets[4] (so if you have an ultrawide monitor with only a single window on a workspace, you can add offsets to the sides so it doesn't stretch across the whole width and give poor usability).

It's not really any one "big thing" but rather a difference in approach which adds up over many small design decisions.

[1]: https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm/issues/563

Bspwm is a window manager. Configuration happens in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/bspwm/bspwmrc, as per stated here: https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm

Use BSPWM. It supports right clicks by default and its modular. You might want to look for status bars that work with it, slstatus does not work. Good luck, supremacist!

I had not heard of bspwm but I am a fan of telling WMs. Looking at the documentation now, I really like the pragmatic approach lol https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm

If you use the bspwm off of github instead of the old 0.9.10, you can use bspc node @parent -y next to cycle the split type of the parent of the focused. I added it ~1.5years ago, after baskerville added node -y horizontal and node -y vertical to set the split type of a node to vertical/horizontal ~2 years ago.

Also bspwm's JSON generation and parsing is not great. If you have a window with quotes in its class name, bspwm, when dumping it, will not escape them generating invalid JSON (e.g. {"className":"the "cool" window",) that jq will not be able to read, and even worse, bspwm itself will not be able to read. (Yes, if a window's class name contains a " character, bspwm will fail to reload after you run wm -r #1362).

It's exactly how it works but only if you have mutliple screens.

My comment was that, for this reason, 2 or 3 smaller (ish- ~27") 16:9 4k screens [1] (previously, 4–6 even smaller 4:3 screens) works much better for me because I can switch the spaces on my Macbook and i3/Sway virtual desktops on my Linux machine individually for each screen.

If we're talking about having a smaller number of giant screens it would need to be able to be partitioned into logical "zones" for virtual desktops to enable this way of managing sets of windows together, and I've not found anything that really does this, let alone does it well (though honorable mention to HerbstluftWM [2] which I think, with patience, could probably do something pretty close).

[1] preferably 16:10 but that seems to have died out as an aspect ratio :(

[2] https://herbstluftwm.org/

Lately I have been playing with herbstluftwm on Artix with dinit, and I dig it. The way it behaves is quite a bit different from other window managers I have used in the past, and it did take some getting used to at first, but after experimenting with the config for a couple days I ended up with a pretty deadly and very intuitive setup that - despite running on X11 - "feels" more like a proper battlestation for sure...

wm: herbstluftwm

Rules can have once and maxage properties - see hlwm's exec_on_tag.sh script for some inspiration.

A few projects like AwesomeWM, and Herbsluftwm have had discussions on their issue trackers about supporting Wayland but a lot of them devolve into "Hey when will this be ready" style of comments, there's an interest in doing it but nobody is personally willing to take on the challenge

- The commit messages - I run the git version, so I like to read about the latest features and fixes. These tend to be more verbose on a feature or fix than the docs, so it can be more helpful. - https://github.com/herbstluftwm/herbstluftwm/commits/master

It's herbstluftwm, a Window Manager! https://herbstluftwm.org/

The nicities that I pull would be the file browser from ROX, and a tiling window manager such as herbstluftwm. I could do everything I do today without these, such as with a terminal or OpenBSD's 'cwm', but I really enjoy using them!