wingo VS bismuth

I've been using X11 on my Framework laptop for years. No desktop environment at all. Just my regulard old school window manager[1]. No KDE or GNOME. But also no XFCE.

The only thing I had to do to get scaling working for me was set two environment variables[2].

I was indeed worried about this when I bought the laptop. Prior to this, I avoided anything with resolutions higher than 1920x1200. But it turned out that everything mostly worked with a couple tweaks.

I think the only real issue I've run into is `git gui`. As I understand it, the GUI toolkit it uses doesn't support scaling? Not sure. I ended up working around it by just increasing font sizes. I suppose this exposes the weakness that is probably impacting you: the scaling on my laptop is being done by the GUI toolkits, not the display server or compositor. (I don't always run a compositor, but when I do, I use `picom`. Mostly just to avoid tearing.)

[1]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo

[2]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/dotfiles/blob/ea3a88e6160f4244...

I used Wingo (https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo) for a while and it did the floating/tiling mix pretty well.

I also used StumpWM (https://stumpwm.github.io/) for years, primarily in purely-tiling mode. The killer feature for me was that you (the user) define frames on the desktop, and then windows are placed into frames rather than resizing and re-jiggering everything whenever a new window opens.

Yeah I remember activities from over a decade ago. I don't recall ever being able to get it to work right.

I ended up writing my own WM instead: https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo

That's why I went and wrote my own window manager that breaks this aspect of EWMH so that workspaces can be changed independently on each head: https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo/

Wingo

Switching to a desktop environment is a no-go for me. (I wrote my own WM.) So I'm very likely going to be spending quite a bit of time trying to find a configuration that works for my eyes. I don't mind putting in that time, I'm just hoping that I can find something that works. But others might bounce off. This is actually why I have historically not purchased laptops with HiDPI displays, specifically to avoid dealing with this problem. I made an exception this time because there are so many other great aspects of the laptop.

What level are you interested in scripting? In KDE Plasma you can interact with the desktop UI via JS: https://develop.kde.org/docs/plasma/scripting/

And then for something more sophisticated there are extensions like https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth.

It does all feel a little disorganized/wild-west-y compared to say, a .vimrc with a list of plugins and bindings, which is something that makes a system like Nix (or a fully containerized DE of some kind) appealing

It had, but they are all dead until ported to the new kde 6.

https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth/issues/471#issuecom...

This is what I used. I found no good replacement for it and that is what made me switch to hyprland.

one thing i would totally recommend for kde is bismuth https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth/

it's tiling for kde and it works REALLY well.

Take a look at a tiling window solution. I'm currently using bismuthwith gives similar arrangement to what you're looking for and helps massively with productivity when working on an ultrawide

As a good halfway house you could do worse than KDE with Bismuth (https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth), which is an add-in that will give you great tiling capability, fully controllable via the keyboard. Couple this with KDE native virtual desktops and you have a pretty decent tiling window manager.

Plasma 5.27 added in some native tiling support. There are also some kwin scripts available to add tiling to it.

https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth

Not-good stuff: This tiling is very incomplete. It doesn't allow you to snap everything to your tiles at once, it doesn't support different tiles per virtual screen/workspace and, perhaps more importantly, with that addition and Plasma 6 on the way, compatibility with Bismuth and similar addons is getting lost.

Since you are already using KDE, you can very easily try how much you like tiling: just install bismuth: https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth It's a plasma add-on that enables tiling in KDE. If you don't like tiling, just disable the plugin again and uninstall bismuth.

No, it doesn't have that. Here is the list of layouts.

No I was talking about Bismuth which was amazing and actively maintained but due to kwin updates it's not working and is apparently not going to be updated