tinywm VS herbstluftwm

> Nobody's requiring Wayland.

Yet. Defaulting to it is one step on the path towards removing support for X and independent window managers forever.

I deeply, deeply care about running an independent window manager. A minimal X window manager is a page of code: https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm/blob/master/tinywm.c (yes, plus xlib); a minimal Wayland compositor is tens of thousands of lines of code.

> contrary to your statements, it's perfectly ready for prime time

These comments are full of folks mentioning issues. Wayland does not support my window manager; thus it is demonstrably not ready for prime time for me.

> Wayland is the way forward

It may actually be. I’m not as opposed to Wayland as I may sound! But do you understand how you and other Wayland advocates sound — like advocates? ‘Wayland is the way forward’; ‘there's no future for Xorg’; these things are arguably true, but they are also rather cruel to say (a bit like ‘inevitably you and everyone will die’: it really is true, but it’s also not at all a nice thing to say).

I do think that Wayland or something very like it may be the way forward, but it needs to be an evolution, not a revolution. I know that the party line is that that’s not possible, but I suspect that rather than not possible it is just very hard. It’s always easier to greenfield, and it is always hell to be 100% backwards compatible.

But that’s what it needs to be.

Hah. I didn't think this was quite HN worthy at this point - the code is still a mess, and has plenty of bugs. It was however the wm I actually use since I got frustrated with bspwm and did a very minimalist rewrite of TinyWM [1] in Ruby [2] and expanded it from there. It was painful the first few days until I'd had time to add multiple desktops and the start of a tiling mode. But at this point, it's "almost" pleasant for me.

The warnings are real, though, apart from the initial hyperbole - this is likely to break for you in all kinds of horrible ways still. I use very few applications beyond (my own) terminal, (my own) polybar replacement, (my own) file manager, and a browser, and so once Chrome and my own apps mostly started working ok I've had very little incentive to make sure it behaves nicely with anything else and I know the distinction between different EWMH window types is incomplete and broken - just not in ways that usually affect my own use.

[1] https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm/blob/master/tinywm.c

[2] https://gist.github.com/vidarh/1cdbfcdf3cfd8d25a247243963e55...

picking a random bare bones wm tinywm

Or Check out TinyWM. Its just a few lines of code.

TinyWM

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!