i3 and sway
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i3 all the way
Sorry to be the boring i3 user but it's a rock solid TWM. Plus I am using the autotiling mod and now it's even better :D
XMonad. Been using it for almost a decade, and very powerful. I3 I hear is also good.
I prefer the way XMonad handles multimonitor workspaces, but left for Sway due to wayland support.
need to give it a try. I'm stuck in the past times lol
Starting with i3 as my first, i tried a bunch of different ones. Xmonad and Qtile were the ones i liked the most but Qtile was buggy and Xmonad while working was super confusing to configure with haskell.
Also tried AwesomeWM, it felt a bit buggy to me in terms of window handling and DWM was just too complicated to patch and even with patches it was too basic
Ended up going back to i3, and then moved over to Sway.
i3 until the day I die
Edit: Why? Because I love how easy it is to get working, it's a nice balance between features and simplicity for me, and IPC features are great for some QoL plugins. Its configuration file format is simple enough, I like lua with wezterm and neovim but I don't really see the point with a WM, I just need to see my windows when I want, the way I want, and to switch to others.
Not sure if this counts as a tiling window manager, but I spend most of my time in emacs in full screen mode. I can create, delete, resize, and swap my windows.
I'm not sure my solution counts either - I just use quicktile with default KDE, because it has the tiling bits that I need and the config file was simple enough that I didn't have to spend a whole day setting it up. I need working memory for other things besides keyboard shortcuts.
DWM
I ran DWM 6.0.2 with (probably too many patches) for a long time, until I finally migrated to 6.4 and reduced the number of patches I was really using to about 6 or 7.
My first tiling WM was Awesome, but even though I'd heard about DWM before, it took Awesome to take the plunge.
DWM due to it's suckless nature
This is perhaps cheating, but after diving deep into the hardcore tiling mangers (ratpoison, wmii, xmonad), I grew softer and stayed in awesome for a while, but eventually I realised that since all I want from tiling anyway is the ability to quickly place two windows beside each other, I might as well go with a DM that does all the other stuff I want automatically (mounting, monitors, etc.), and since KDE is now good again, and coming along on the tiling side, that's the tiling WM I'm using.
Yes, I said I was cheating ...!
Sway with autotiling
and a few nifty scripts (launch or focus and such) and Waybar. The combination of having scratchpads, sensible autotiling along with titlebars and the wonderful world of wayland is supreme.
i3 is what I've been using the past few years. I've tried others, but I always end back up with i3 as I've found nothing else to be as simple and efficient for my workflow, with 12 workspaces across 2 monitors.
Sway, but single window capture and the animations make hyprland very tempting...
hyprland is worth it
I've probed a few tiling wms: dwm: never ending tinkering, a lot of frustration and despair with incombatible patches. i3: manual tiling is not for me. spectrewm: nice, but too less features. xmonad: nice, but Haskell. Awesome: at first it was not my favourite, but it comes with most of the features I need. Missing features can be added in a short time (awesome is build from C and Lua, awesome's plugins are pretty simple lua scripts). Awesome is full operable via the mouse or the keyboard - awesome is able to act as a stacking window manager; a very handy feature, when coming from a stacking window manager (I've used icewm for twenty years). Summary: a very good tool to form a work environment that is adapted to your personal workflow.
i3 just works in my opinion, and I can change stuff how I like it. It's simple and has loads of users, so guides are easy to come by.
Recently I have been using river. It's extremely easy to configure via a shell script, and it's very fast and stable. It's another dwm clone
It's not exactly a dwm clone, it's way better than that. It takes all the best parts from dwm and bspwm, and I've been loving it so far
I usually use tiling add-ons for Gnome or KDE. So pop-shell or bismuth.
Hyprland. It's the first tiling manager that made me consider switching to and it was absolutely worth it.
Currently using sway, but mostly for the lack of good Auto tilers on Wayland
I'm on Hyprland (wayland compositer, wl-roots based). Prior to the wayland transition I was on dwm. Hyprland offers a dynamic tiling layout just like dwm, which was my main selling point. The dev is very active and hyprland is gaining maturity rapidly (more than alternatives like dwl or river did at the time I checked it out). I also tried i3 and sway, but they don't quite cut it for me as they don't do dynamic tiling out of the box.
I wish Hyprland gets into the Fedora repos. I don't wanna have to deal with building stuff.
I use i3, but to say that I like it is a bit overstated. It's fine, does what I expect the very basic of a tiling window manager to do. I used Nimdow for a while and it's pretty good, the default bar is way better than i3 (supports ANSI colour coding, mouse presses, etc.), but I could never quite get to grips with the tiling algorithm.
I'm working on my own WM though, it's not tiling per-se, I choose to call in non-overlapping and I'm trying to solve my gripes with i3. Basically windows should not be forcefully expanded if they don't want to. Try open galculator under i3 and watch the horror. And when expanded the size should be split based on their initial sizes. So if I have Firefox open and want to do something in a quick terminal window the terminal won't get 1/2 of the screen. Firefox wanted more space than the terminal initially, so the terminal gets to take up a smaller share of the space.
I’ve been using i3. Nothing super advanced but the config is easy and being able to reload in place is nice
Today I use Plasma, but if I need a tiling wm I use awesome. It's so great and customizable. If you're fine with Lua, is easy to config.
EXWM. I am a longtime Emacs user so merging the concepts of Emacs buffers and X windows is a huge benefit. Only one set of keybindings to worry about, all of my Emacs window management stuff works for X windows too. One less external dependency to worry about too. In a new environment (like when starting a new job etc) as long as I have my Emacs config I am good to go.
i3 gang rise up!
I've only tried i3 and it just works, so I stuck with it. After learning the hotkeys it never seems to get in the way (at least for my usage). Riced it a bit. Then some polybar sparkled in there. A wallpaper. What more can a guy want?
I tried i3 back in 2019 and I've been using it ever since on my desktop.
@cyclohexane for me it was and always will be bspwm. Once I had it configured it was the coziest of cozies.
Pop!_OS 20.04 LTS... I love how it combines tiling and stacking. Sure I could use workspaces instead of stacks, but with stacks... I can use both!
I've also used EXWM and am going to give it another whirl after I upgrade to emacs 28 with native comp
LeftWM, because it's a really nice community to get involved with, and i like rust so i contributed a bit to the project
I used StumpWM for many years. It was great for most of my workflow and, being written in Common Lisp, you can recompile parts of it while it's running (I didn't do this often but it was a cool feature).
Bspwm and i3 , I like i3 more cause i can manually do everything and the documentation is amazing
AwesomeWM because nice defaults and you can configure it with Lua like neovim but I want to try hyprland in the future
I started with for a bit awm, however i am giving qtile a try since im learning how to code python so good practice.
I used DWM for a year or so (still do use it on my librebooted 2008 T400 gentoo thinkpad just to stay below 100MiB of memory after boot for the lols) and recently switched to sway.
My primary reason for sway was it being relatively simple and to try out wayland (which works with minor bugs in xwayland). Initial configuration took me about 1h and i wrote a small program in rust to populate the title-bar. Works like a charm and i like my stuff to be simple so i don't think i will look into different TWMs.