spectrwm VS i3-auto-layout

I use the tiling WM spectrwm. It lets me pull windows out of tiling mode and into window mode. I think a common operation on most tiling window managers. Most of the time I don't want overlapping windows(thus the tiling WM) but every once in a while I do, so the best of both worlds.

It is a bit obscure but I quite like spectrwm, it fills this sweet spot where it is much simpler than I3 but much more feature complete than DWM.

https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm

are you using spectrwm? it seems like this file comes from there, and they use it to make programs open in particular workspaces: https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm/issues/500

Here is one website with screenshots. https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm

Spectrwm is by far the easiest WM I've tested. Also Fluxbox is pretty much straightforward.

Spectrwm is by far the most beginner-friendly WM I've ever tested. Im now running EXWM the buffers management is something else.

I'm a recent convert to i3/sway, after a solid decade using spectrwm (which has not been ported to Wayland, I'm afraid).

This is supposedly fixed in the master branch, but there has been no release in over a year - I'll just set corner and shadow excludes and sit down. I'll notice when a new release is here :)

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