i3-auto-layout VS river

The problem with this fairly complex solution is that the easier path by far is simpler window arrangements, multiple monitors, and many workspaces. Once you have more windows than fit on a workspace its easier just to have more workspaces and 1-3 windows is what basically universally fits on most monitors.

If you organize more things in the same space you probably need indivdual apps that themselves have tabs like browsers, editors, IDEs rather than more windows.

Personally I use https://github.com/chmln/i3-auto-layout to make slightly better layouts automatically be automatically alternating between v and h splits and find this fits my needs 95% of the time.

Shit work under i3 is already very small but if you wanted to reduce it further I think you could probably go a long way with a very simple feature.

Add a save button that saves current layout to a list like so

Browser, calculator

Browser, pdf reader

terminal terminal terminal

ide terminal terminal

Then have a restore function that simply walks the list finds the entry that matches the kind and number of window and shoves existing windows into that layout. You can at creation time use something like i3-save-tree, edit the json, yada yada but its all fairly manual and I think for the use case it would be relatively simpler. The few non standard all match for me a simple pattern eg there really isn't 2 different ways I want IDE terminal terminal

i3-auto-layout is faster and less resource usage

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.

In my very specific case, I'd probably start by taking a look at how animations were previously implemented in river, and then I'd pay careful attention to that transform matrix at the end. I'm not super crazy about the implementation using timers to drive it (versus interpolating where the transform should be across a deadline), but I guess they were going for smoothness.

riverwm wayland compositor