komorebi VS komorebi-application-specific-configuration

I love seeing whenever this is (re)posted.

This article had such a huge impact on my life and led to me creating many pieces of software[1][2][3] that were hyper-specific to myself and my needs at the time, which also later found an audience in others who think and work in ways similar to me.

[1]: https://notado.app - a "content-first" internet bookmarking and highlighting service which has been my second brain since 2020 after growing frustrated with Instapaper, Pinboard and Readwise. Eventually I expanded this to allow for RSS feed publishing on specific topics in an attempt to solve the "firehose" problem when following other peoples' bookmarks/shares, and at the end of last year I added what is now my most used feature of image generation from highlights for sharing on image-first/text-hostile social media platforms.

[2]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi - tiling window manager for Windows. There wasn't really anything fit for purpose on Windows when I started, and I was too spoiled by bspwm and yabai on Linux and macOS that I just had to write something before I could become a truly productive Windows user. I'm astonished that this now has 50k+ downloads.

[3]: https://kulli.sh - I use this to aggregate comments from HN/Reddit/Lemmy/Lobsters on an article I'm interests in in one place to read. This has helped me find some interesting niche communities on Reddit and Lemmy who share and discuss things I'm interested in that I otherwise wouldn't have found.

It's very heartening to see all of the stories here.

I've put the last few years of my life into working on komorebi, a tiling window manager for Windows[1], https://notado.app, a content-first social bookmarking service, and https://kulli.sh, a "bring your own links" comment aggregator which shows you comments from hn, reddit, lobsters, lemmy etc. on an article all in one place.

Unfortunately I was laid off after 5 years with the same company last month, and nobody seems to care about any of these projects when it comes to recruiting. There are people who use them that have reached out to me very kindly offering to make referrals, but the job market values LeetCode more than shipping real code these days.

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi

In the spirit of full disclosure, I wanted to share that throughout the changeset of this refactor which included 11 files changed, 597 insertions, and 133 deletions (full diff here), a single regression was found due to a logic error I introduced.

The two biggest tiling window manager projects for Windows are komorebi and GlazeWM. Komorebi is probably faster and more resource efficient since it is written in Rust, but I stick with Glaze for now since it has a cool status bar built in I like.

Not too many options for Windows OS, but this one looks decent: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi.

It's been a while since I last posted here. Since my last post, komorebi passed 3k stars on GitHub, became the most starred Windows twm of all time (surpassing bug.n!) and crossed 20k downloads.

This is pretty depressing. I'm pretty involved in the ricing side of the Windows ecosystem[1] and there is a lot of work going on in this space to allow users to get rid of the start bar entirely and replace it with something more functional. I would love for the day when there could just be a user friendly drop-in replacement.

[1]: I develop one of the two main Windows twms (https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi)

Haha hello!

I don't use Teams personally but I believe some people have solved this and it is part of the standard application-specific fixes that are used to generate base configurations.[1]

Thanks to the architecture of komorebi, it's pretty easy for users to fix (and then contribute fixes for) weird behaviour of individual apps without touching the source code.

Thankfully an army of dedicated users has congregated on the project Discord so if you ever get stuck with the sort of behaviour you're describing with any application, someone on the server will be able to show you to fix it (and then add the fix to the application-specific fixes repo so future users never have to deal with it).

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi-application-specific-conf...

[4] https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi-application-specific-conf...

Introducing a decoupled library of application-specific fixes in YAML that can be used to generate the majority of configuration options for applications that are uncooperative-by-default. The goal is to eventually just be able to run one command to generate 99% of your configuration, leaving you to focus on the other 1% which should essentially be your preferred shortcuts and workspace layout options.

komorebi dev here. I can't tell you the number of times I've wanted to just write my own take on sxhkd[1] for Windows and use that to manage my own keybindings for komorebi instead of ahk.

You can just as easily write your own/use another hotkey daemon or PowerShell scripts to handle komorebi's configuration and keybindings, in that sense there is no dependency on ahk at all. However, the inertia around ahk in the Windows ecosystem is undeniable and it's in the interests of making adoption and onboarding easier that the project provides example ahk files and has invested in an ahk code generation library.

My thoughts on the dominant hotkey daemon in the Windows ecosystem aside, I remain convinced that the famous bspwm socket communication architecture[2] is the best way to handle both configuration and keybindings for a tiling window manager that has been proposed to this today.

Unfortunately I have to concede that there is a certain configuration burden that comes with komorebi, which is amplified in some cases by having to write/maintain ahk. This configuration burden is largely due to the highly fragmented nature of Windows application development that is discussed often on HN and it is inescapable.

With this in mind, the next release of komorebi (currently available on master) will invest even more heavily in automatic configuration generation.

A separate repository of common application-specific configuration tweaks[3] (in YAML!) has been created which I and others from the komorebi Discord server are contributing to, with the goal of having the edge cases for as many applications as possible fully documented so that a comprehensive configuration file can be generated[4] for the user which ensures that every (major) Windows application behaves as expected under a tiling window manager.

I hope that other Windows tiling window manager developers can use these YAML definitions in the future to handle the same edge cases in their projects so that eventually there will be a tiling window manager of every flavour (bspwm, i3wm etc.) available for Windows users where having to manually accommodate and compensate for the non-standard behaviour of individual applications is a thing of the past.

[1]: https://github.com/baskerville/sxhkd

[2]: https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm#description

[3]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi-application-specific-conf...

[4]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi/#generating-common-applic...