Great project but I truly believe that these single screen window managers are going to be a thing of the past if Scrollable WMs manage to find some more marketting.
Niri[1] and PaperWM[2] for example, these Scrolling WMs provide a way to tile your apps in a way that feels natural. It's like having multiple monitors without having multiple monitors.
When I first used PaperWM on Gnome, I just couldn't think of a reason why somebody would even use their computer the normal way when these exist.
The point behind tiling WMs and why a lot of people use lightweight IDEs (meaning multi-window IDEs) is that the idea of virtual desktops is used as a state management and state chronic restoration tool.
A lot of i3/sway users I've seen (including me) are using virtual desktops to not forget what they were working on before the current task. Each dependency that created a sub task in their workflow is represented by a "new layer set of windows". If they have multiple monitors, each monitor has a dedicated place for tools. E.g. the browser window for research, the debugging output, the app window they're working on etc.
Why I think scrolling WMs don't integrate nicely with this is because they lose the state of the historic placement of windows, which is kinda bad for this kind of workflow. But it might be just my bubble of devs that I interacted with.
Would be nice to hear how you were using tiling WMs before that? Was your workflow similar at all to what I described?
NayamAmarshe 262 days ago [-]
When I'm already on a laptop with a small screen, tiling only makes each app fight for screen estate. With Scrolling WMs, it's not an issue because it's just like switching to the second monitor by moving your mouse over to the other app. Now imagine instead of 2 monitors side-by-side, you could have infinite monitors. Not just side-by-side, what about stacked? Scrolling WMs come with vertical workspaces too!
You can still use a Scrolling WM to tile everything the way you would on a Tiling WM and that is where it shines. It's a fantastic solution to the screen estate problem, which tiling managers struggle with.
You're right that they are a bit different but I personally don't see the need for tiling when Scrolling WMs provide the same functionality (vertical and horizontal tiling + workspaces) as well :D
Sakos 262 days ago [-]
Precisely this. It feels like scrolling WMs and tiling WMs are entirely different paradigms. I see no way to transfer my workflow with tiling to a scrolling WM.
dawser 261 days ago [-]
You can also use workspaces with a scrolling layout, you keep the advantages of both, and you don't need to keep on resizing/moving windows because they are too small.
When I moved to Hyprland after having tried almost every DE and tiling WM, I had to write my own layout plugin (hyprscroller) because of how much I missed PaperWM.
If you moved from classic DEs with floating windows and lots of mouse to a tiling WM, scrolling adds another advantage. You can even ignore it and use it as a classic tiling WM, but you also have all the advantages of scrolling once you find a use for them.
NayamAmarshe 262 days ago [-]
Yes, they are fundamentally different in a way (although you could still keep the same layouts with Scrolling WMs). Scrolling WMs are a lot more useful for laptops, where the screen area is limited. It replaces the need for multi-monitors for me and that's quite revolutionary.
Multiple workspaces satisfy this need for me a lot better. In fact, I'm pretty sure that they were invented with the idea of "having multiple monitors without having multiple monitors". A key detail is that I can organise windows on-screen however I want with ease, while also having windows on another workspace organised with a completely different layout. And I usually have 10 workspaces available.
Scrolling WMs are too "linear", so jumping to arbitrary locations becomes harder. E.g.: I can jump from workspace 1 to workspace 7 in O(1), but on a scrolling WM there's no equivalent action to jump right such a large, arbitrary distance.
Mind you, scrolling WMs still sound nice. If you don't _want_ multiple workspaces (or maybe just one or two), they'll likely work out better. They sound like a superb solution for a living room display or touch-only devices. In fact, I'm looking forward to experimenting with niri on my mobile phone.
NayamAmarshe 262 days ago [-]
I hear you but I feel that there's more to it than that. Workspaces while useful, are still more of a closed-door where once you've switched to a workspace, the other ones just disappear as if they don't exist.
Scrolling fixes that problem because I can quickly use my touchpad to scroll through multiple windows, that can be set to 70% of the total width. This means I can actually see what the other apps are doing in realtime. This is different because scrolling WMs 'make you feel' like you're using multiple monitors, since switching to the other windows is very similar.
Scrolling WMs still have workspaces though, so that's not going anywhere but it's one of those 'see it to believe it' things. Scrolling WMs really changed my perspective.
I used almost every DE and tiling window manager before I arrived to PaperWM, and when I moved to Hyprland because of its simplicity and the control it gave me, I had to write a scrolling layout because of how much I missed PaperWM.
- Having a scrolling layout doesn't prevent you from using workspaces, you have both. I use workspaces, some of which are scrolling with rows and columns depending on the task associated to them.
- Jumping to arbitrary locations also takes just one keystroke (and no mouse). For example, hyprscroller supports marks. Set a mark to a window, and you can jump (and get immediate focus) to that window with a key combination. You can move to your editor, e-mail program etc, with one key press, even if they are in different workspaces and not seen on the screen (kind of like in vim)
- You don't need to browse through stacks of hidden windows, they can all be at their preferred size and "seen" at the same time. Once you accept the paradigm, it is very fast, and there is support for overview modes where you can see all your windows scaled to fit the monitor.
- You can automatically resize a set of windows to fit your monitor with a key stroke, allowing you to have all your currently needed windows (editor, docs, browser) visible at the same time, while you don't "lose" the rest, they are simply outside of the monitor area, a keystroke away, and keeping their original size.
It changed the way I work so much I had to write my own plugin as soon as I moved to Hyprland. You basically forget about the mouse and resizing/moving windows.
kelvie 263 days ago [-]
I just switched from hyprland (due to those toxicity articles) back to KDE, and was pleasantly surprised at how much better these scrollable WMs are. I use Karousel[1] which is actually implemented as a KWin script, amazingly.
Thank you for the recommendation. Just installed karousel on Plasma 6 and it works wonderfully part for really weird default keyboard shortcuts. Nothing a few minutes in the settings panel couldn't fix.
I'm not exactly sold on the window scrolling idea yet but switching between Karousel and Polonium[1] which is a traditional twm for Kwin is very easy so I'll be experiment with both.
While scripts can provide a similar experience, without Niri or PaperWM the experience will be sub-par. Scrolling WMs amazing with a touchpad and now that Niri supports mouse, I believe it'll be a great experience.
wraptile 262 days ago [-]
Could you clarify what's missing with this kwin script? The only thing I see is that window stacking doesn't work on wayland.
Personally, I've given up of controlling all pieces of my DE like setting up busses and keyboard shortcuts. KDE already does all of this brilliantly and kwin scripts get the rest so I can have my cake and eat it too.
kelvie 262 days ago [-]
Touchpad gestures don't work, it would be really nice if I could scroll with my touchpad, although there may be a way using some type of evdev capturer that mimics a shortcut
This is a pretty good overview. There have been several HN discussions on this matter.
jorvi 262 days ago [-]
That is not an overview. An overview would show both sides.
I’m not saying Vaxry is right or did nothing wrong, or that Drew’s portrayal is wrong, but what you linked is just Drew’s personal musings on the situation.
I’ve seen someone be viciously attacked online for being bigoted against people who are less mentally able, only for it to surface after the attacks (and professional consequences) that the “bigotry” was calling someone a moron a few times.
Be careful about taking sides when you have only one side of the story. Not long ago HN harassed a Google employee for supposedly stealing a JavaScript accessibility project, only for it to later come to light that the accuser was dealing with some difficult personal situations that caused him to portray the entire thing lopsidedly.
xyzzy_plugh 262 days ago [-]
Nah. You don't have to show both sides when the evidence is stacked. We don't have to publicize the criminal's take when they're unanimously, unambiguously convicted of murder. It's one thing if there is ambiguity, and the collective opinion is undecided, but that's not the case here.
Drew's personal musings on the situation form a reasonable overview in this case. Even a fraction of the evidence publicized is enough to justify the label "toxic."
snvzz 262 days ago [-]
Drew has been seen commenting (very unnecessarily) on Hyprland's code quality or lack thereof.
I see a wm's main developer attacking a developer of another wm, and it's not pretty.
resonious 263 days ago [-]
Wow Niri looks really good. This is basically how I use GNOME. Problem with that is that when I plug into my ultrawide, I have to pull all my windows out of the separate workspaces, and vice-versa when I unplug.
dheera 263 days ago [-]
Personally I find the Ubuntu tiling asssistant quite adequate (super+1 super+2 super+3 etc. on the numeric keypad) and haven't really understood what these tiling WMs offer over that.
NayamAmarshe 262 days ago [-]
You gotta try PaperWM Gnome extension. It's hard for me to use Linux the normal way when PaperWM exists. It's very useful on a laptop because it gives you the feeling of having multiple monitors and makes window arrangement trivial.
all2 263 days ago [-]
I was going to ask what made a single horizontal strip superior to i3 or swayed, until I saw the work spaces.
I'd love to see a vertical version of this for phones and tablets.
Zababa 262 days ago [-]
Scrolling WMs seems to be alt+tab on steroid. Alt+tab is context dependant. Sometimes you'll need to press tab 3 times to go to your note taking app, sometimes 1, sometimes 5. On my computer it's always secondary screen (mod+right) then tag 1 (mod+1). There's still some context, I don't always put everything at the same place, so I've got mod+s to fuzzy find in the windows names.
From a aesthetic perspective, niri has slow animations and has one every time you move. That tells me it's not focused on moving instantly and as fast as possible from one window to another, so it's not for me. Sure you can probably configure it to do it differently, and if it was the only option in town I'm sure I wouldn't be too sad, it seems great. But it's made by and for people with different needs and wants than me.
> It's like having multiple monitors without having multiple monitors.
That's what tiling window managers are at the most basic level for me. 9 tags, 9 monitors in one! But also, I can display multiple tags at once.
christophilus 262 days ago [-]
It's a personal preference thing. I've never liked tiling WMs. I have no use for tiny little stacked terminals / windows. But, I know folks who will never do anything other than a tiling WM. (I'm writing this from Niri, by the way. It is excellent.)
walteweiss 259 days ago [-]
Tiling WM for me is the ability to use every app full-screened, with any key combination for accessing it. It’s so great on a laptop that I’m — a macOS user for over a decade — unwilling to use anything but a tiling WM on my laptop ever again. It’s a perfect WM for me already, in every single way. An actual tiling thing, when you open multiple windows on one screen, is something that I never use. Or maybe just once in a blue moon.
Oh wow. After bouncing off tiling wms for years, I just enabled PaperWM on PopOS and immediately love it. I kind of want this everywhere - phone, Mac, etc.
Very interesting. I keep using gnome with extensions to make it easy to scroll through workspaces vertically. It works very well for me. Happy to see this.
lambdaloop 263 days ago [-]
This is amazing, I just ran it and it works perfectly for my needs!
For context, I recently switched to the KDE window manager (KWin) after a decade of xmonad, to simplify my configuration. KWin supports some tiling but isn't really built for it, so I had some minor annoyances. I ran cortile and it perfectly auto-tiled my windows and allows me to still adjust the sizes with the mouse!
Thank you to the author!
I'd say some default shortcuts conflict with commonly used browser shortcuts, namely ctrl-shift-t and ctrl-shift-r . It's quite easy to configure these, but I found it to be a strange choice for default shortcuts.
kelvie 263 days ago [-]
Mentioned this in another comment, but there are pretty good implementations of tiling window managers as kwin scripts inside kwin. I've been using Karousel and it's been great, coming straight from Hyprland.
I use a plasma widget called "Command Output" to replicate most of what I needed from waybar, and set up Breeze to not have title bars, and added a plugin to get rounded window corners, and I don't miss hyprland at all anymore.
all2 263 days ago [-]
I have a config on github to replace plasma's core window manager with i3wm.
Why did you stop using it? Once I tried it I never looked back.
neontomo 262 days ago [-]
I would use it, I just never thought of getting it set up on my Mac. Do you know if it's possible/as good?
I do love the simplicity and speed of DWM.
leephillips 262 days ago [-]
There are people using dwm on the Mac. I’ve never tried that myself.
fikama 262 days ago [-]
For me its not supporting wayland
jrm4 263 days ago [-]
OMG finally.
NEVER understood why you needed to create a whole new WM for the creation of some solid window patterns with shortcuts.
colordrops 263 days ago [-]
Have you ever used a tiling window manager? It's a lot more than a few shortcuts and window patterns. I've used scripts and apps over standard WMs and it's usually a sub-par experience.
jrm4 262 days ago [-]
I have, and my take is literally the opposite of yours.
The full-on tiling managers are often very stripped down, and there are a lot of nice little bells and whistles in the big boys that can be made optional.
colordrops 262 days ago [-]
What I mean is that the tiling functionality is subpar when added as a second thought. Of course a traditional WM/DM is going to have a lot more bells and whistles.
jrm4 262 days ago [-]
Right.
I mean, this gets at my whole issue with WM/DEs, why can't they ALL be more modular? At the end of the day, they're just a collection of programs.
colordrops 262 days ago [-]
Oh yeah, 100%. This domain should also follow the unix philosophy of a composition of single purpose utilities. It's why I prefer tiling WMs like i3, Sway, and Hyprland. They do very little other than managing window tiling and key bindings. Everything else is roll-your-own. My config for Hyprland uses a couple dozen different programs to get things setup to my liking, e.g. Waybar for the system bar, rofi for launching programs, wlsunset for nighttime color management, swayidle and swaylock for the idle locking and lock screen, sway notification center for notifications, grim and slurp for screen capture, etc...
I share a lot of my config between Sway and Hyprland because of this modularity. They are flexible enough that you could configure them to look and run just like KDE and no one would be the wiser.
3abiton 263 days ago [-]
Kudos for this, what's your pitch for i3 users?
porphyra 263 days ago [-]
It adds tiling to floating window managers like openbox, xfwm, and kwin, giving tiling to more mainstream desktop environments like GNOME, XFCE, and KDE. It's not really made for i3 users I think.
I guess the advantage over i3 would be that those desktop environments have better integration with certain apps and a coherent look and feel. For example, on Ubuntu, which uses a modified GNOME, you can add tiling while still enjoying stuff like the volume control widget, gnome-control-center, consistent file open dialogs, and so on.
squigz 263 days ago [-]
I'm curious about this too. You'll have to pry i3 away from my cold dead hands.
stirfish 263 days ago [-]
Stick with i3!
For anyone who wants i3 but doesn't want to configure it, the only other option I know of was regolith:
This looks like a nice fit for my xfwm machine and I'm excited to try it.
squigz 263 days ago [-]
Stuff like Regolith is great, but do yourself a favor and invest some time in making your desktop your own - it makes a world of difference in terms of efficiency, and you get to learn how all these applications work, what they're capable of, etc.
pluc 263 days ago [-]
Seriously - i3 config isn't that complicated and the documentation/community is great.
squigz 263 days ago [-]
Having been part of the i3 community for many years, yes it is, and thanks!
stirfish 263 days ago [-]
I agree. I've only used regolith once, and it was a work computer that I didn't feel like copying my config to and didn't want to spend time configuring from scratch. It was nice in that case.
This certainly looks interesting. Cannot comment on it's current state, as I still use bismuth on x11
Zababa 262 days ago [-]
Looks interesting, I'll probably use it if I'm forced to use a KDE or Gnome or something. Counterintuitively, the reason I use tiling managers is not tiling, it's the virtual desktop handling. Last time I tried both gnome and KDE are weird about it. KDE doesn't want you to use mod+é as a shortcut. Gnome allows you to either move both virtual desktops at one or have one fixed and one that moves, but I want both virtual desktops (one on each screen) to move independently.
rcarmo 263 days ago [-]
Seems pretty nice, but also missing a central column layout (which I use on widescreen monitors).
jamesponddotco 263 days ago [-]
This looks pretty nice, I'll have to try it if I ever switch back to X11. What surprises me the most is that it's written in Go.
Not a bad thing, I love Go. It surprised me is all.
blahgeek 263 days ago [-]
It’s sad that this type of projects will not be possible with Wayland, because apparently pluggable wm is not a thing in Wayland
Arnavion 263 days ago [-]
It can be if one wants to. For example river has its own protocol for letting clients arbitrarily position windows. There's a builtin one that does tiling, and then a bunch of user-created ones at https://codeberg.org/river/wiki/src/branch/master/pages/Comm...
But yes, it requires such extensibility support from the compositor, unlike this project that works with any X11 compositor because it just relies on EWMH.
blahgeek 263 days ago [-]
It seems like it's reinventing (an partial, incomplete, non-standard) Xorg protocol on top of Wayland, while we can simply use X11
eikenberry 262 days ago [-]
For now... but it is mostly unmaintained at this point and it is only a matter of time before it starts breaking if no one takes over. Which looks doubtful.
WhyNotHugo 262 days ago [-]
You can implement hot corners on Wayland using layer-shell and creating a 1px transparent surface on each monitor corner.
yjftsjthsd-h 262 days ago [-]
Can you? I grant that you can probably trigger like that, but does Wayland have a generic way to move+resize windows?
WhyNotHugo 253 days ago [-]
> does Wayland have a generic way to move+resize windows?
I'm not entirely sure what you mean here or how it is related to hot corners.
The compositor itself can move windows anywhere (it is in full control). A client moving the windows of other clients is not permitted, although compositor-specific interfaces exist for this. There's no standard here because a stacking compositor implements completely different semantics from a tiling compositor. I'm sure that protocol extensions will come up for niche use cases over time.
hawski 262 days ago [-]
I thought about this and came to a conclusion, that it should be possible, though not exactly easy, to implement a Wayland compositor that speaks enough X11 to run an X11 Window Manager which would position Wayland windows, while not nullifying the whole security angle of Wayland.
p_l 262 days ago [-]
At that point you're slowly going to rebuild X11 except without XFree86 baggage and with some extensions (like extensive security that some servers provided) included whereas XFree86 (and tbqh, wayland) come from the land of "first step, disable selinux"
263 days ago [-]
262 days ago [-]
InTheArena 263 days ago [-]
Awesome, I love the pop OS tiling support, but the rest of the OS is a couple of years out of date at this point, so I have not been able to stick with it. The newest version doesn’t compile the newest Ubuntu version either.
Niri[1] and PaperWM[2] for example, these Scrolling WMs provide a way to tile your apps in a way that feels natural. It's like having multiple monitors without having multiple monitors.
When I first used PaperWM on Gnome, I just couldn't think of a reason why somebody would even use their computer the normal way when these exist.
[1]: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri
[2]: https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM
PS: Check out Niri's releases section for videos.
The point behind tiling WMs and why a lot of people use lightweight IDEs (meaning multi-window IDEs) is that the idea of virtual desktops is used as a state management and state chronic restoration tool.
A lot of i3/sway users I've seen (including me) are using virtual desktops to not forget what they were working on before the current task. Each dependency that created a sub task in their workflow is represented by a "new layer set of windows". If they have multiple monitors, each monitor has a dedicated place for tools. E.g. the browser window for research, the debugging output, the app window they're working on etc.
Why I think scrolling WMs don't integrate nicely with this is because they lose the state of the historic placement of windows, which is kinda bad for this kind of workflow. But it might be just my bubble of devs that I interacted with.
Would be nice to hear how you were using tiling WMs before that? Was your workflow similar at all to what I described?
You can still use a Scrolling WM to tile everything the way you would on a Tiling WM and that is where it shines. It's a fantastic solution to the screen estate problem, which tiling managers struggle with.
You're right that they are a bit different but I personally don't see the need for tiling when Scrolling WMs provide the same functionality (vertical and horizontal tiling + workspaces) as well :D
When I moved to Hyprland after having tried almost every DE and tiling WM, I had to write my own layout plugin (hyprscroller) because of how much I missed PaperWM.
If you moved from classic DEs with floating windows and lots of mouse to a tiling WM, scrolling adds another advantage. You can even ignore it and use it as a classic tiling WM, but you also have all the advantages of scrolling once you find a use for them.
[1] hyprslidr: https://gitlab.com/magus/hyprslidr
[2] hyprscroller: https://github.com/dawsers/hyprscroller
Though need to extend hyprland to support layout outside viewport: https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/5489
Scrolling WMs are too "linear", so jumping to arbitrary locations becomes harder. E.g.: I can jump from workspace 1 to workspace 7 in O(1), but on a scrolling WM there's no equivalent action to jump right such a large, arbitrary distance.
Mind you, scrolling WMs still sound nice. If you don't _want_ multiple workspaces (or maybe just one or two), they'll likely work out better. They sound like a superb solution for a living room display or touch-only devices. In fact, I'm looking forward to experimenting with niri on my mobile phone.
Scrolling fixes that problem because I can quickly use my touchpad to scroll through multiple windows, that can be set to 70% of the total width. This means I can actually see what the other apps are doing in realtime. This is different because scrolling WMs 'make you feel' like you're using multiple monitors, since switching to the other windows is very similar.
Scrolling WMs still have workspaces though, so that's not going anywhere but it's one of those 'see it to believe it' things. Scrolling WMs really changed my perspective.
I used almost every DE and tiling window manager before I arrived to PaperWM, and when I moved to Hyprland because of its simplicity and the control it gave me, I had to write a scrolling layout because of how much I missed PaperWM.
- Having a scrolling layout doesn't prevent you from using workspaces, you have both. I use workspaces, some of which are scrolling with rows and columns depending on the task associated to them.
- Jumping to arbitrary locations also takes just one keystroke (and no mouse). For example, hyprscroller supports marks. Set a mark to a window, and you can jump (and get immediate focus) to that window with a key combination. You can move to your editor, e-mail program etc, with one key press, even if they are in different workspaces and not seen on the screen (kind of like in vim)
- You don't need to browse through stacks of hidden windows, they can all be at their preferred size and "seen" at the same time. Once you accept the paradigm, it is very fast, and there is support for overview modes where you can see all your windows scaled to fit the monitor.
- You can automatically resize a set of windows to fit your monitor with a key stroke, allowing you to have all your currently needed windows (editor, docs, browser) visible at the same time, while you don't "lose" the rest, they are simply outside of the monitor area, a keystroke away, and keeping their original size.
It changed the way I work so much I had to write my own plugin as soon as I moved to Hyprland. You basically forget about the mouse and resizing/moving windows.
[1] https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel
I'm not exactly sold on the window scrolling idea yet but switching between Karousel and Polonium[1] which is a traditional twm for Kwin is very easy so I'll be experiment with both.
1 - https://github.com/zeroxoneafour/polonium
Personally, I've given up of controlling all pieces of my DE like setting up busses and keyboard shortcuts. KDE already does all of this brilliantly and kwin scripts get the rest so I can have my cake and eat it too.
This is a pretty good overview. There have been several HN discussions on this matter.
I’m not saying Vaxry is right or did nothing wrong, or that Drew’s portrayal is wrong, but what you linked is just Drew’s personal musings on the situation.
I’ve seen someone be viciously attacked online for being bigoted against people who are less mentally able, only for it to surface after the attacks (and professional consequences) that the “bigotry” was calling someone a moron a few times.
Be careful about taking sides when you have only one side of the story. Not long ago HN harassed a Google employee for supposedly stealing a JavaScript accessibility project, only for it to later come to light that the accuser was dealing with some difficult personal situations that caused him to portray the entire thing lopsidedly.
Drew's personal musings on the situation form a reasonable overview in this case. Even a fraction of the evidence publicized is enough to justify the label "toxic."
I see a wm's main developer attacking a developer of another wm, and it's not pretty.
I'd love to see a vertical version of this for phones and tablets.
From a aesthetic perspective, niri has slow animations and has one every time you move. That tells me it's not focused on moving instantly and as fast as possible from one window to another, so it's not for me. Sure you can probably configure it to do it differently, and if it was the only option in town I'm sure I wouldn't be too sad, it seems great. But it's made by and for people with different needs and wants than me.
> It's like having multiple monitors without having multiple monitors.
That's what tiling window managers are at the most basic level for me. 9 tags, 9 monitors in one! But also, I can display multiple tags at once.
For context, I recently switched to the KDE window manager (KWin) after a decade of xmonad, to simplify my configuration. KWin supports some tiling but isn't really built for it, so I had some minor annoyances. I ran cortile and it perfectly auto-tiled my windows and allows me to still adjust the sizes with the mouse!
Thank you to the author!
I'd say some default shortcuts conflict with commonly used browser shortcuts, namely ctrl-shift-t and ctrl-shift-r . It's quite easy to configure these, but I found it to be a strange choice for default shortcuts.
I use a plasma widget called "Command Output" to replicate most of what I needed from waybar, and set up Breeze to not have title bars, and added a plugin to get rounded window corners, and I don't miss hyprland at all anymore.
https://github.com/comalice/dotfiles if you're interested.
I like kde's batteries included stuff, but none of the tiling functionality matched i3.
https://suckless.org/philosophy/
I do love the simplicity and speed of DWM.
NEVER understood why you needed to create a whole new WM for the creation of some solid window patterns with shortcuts.
The full-on tiling managers are often very stripped down, and there are a lot of nice little bells and whistles in the big boys that can be made optional.
I mean, this gets at my whole issue with WM/DEs, why can't they ALL be more modular? At the end of the day, they're just a collection of programs.
I share a lot of my config between Sway and Hyprland because of this modularity. They are flexible enough that you could configure them to look and run just like KDE and no one would be the wiser.
I guess the advantage over i3 would be that those desktop environments have better integration with certain apps and a coherent look and feel. For example, on Ubuntu, which uses a modified GNOME, you can add tiling while still enjoying stuff like the volume control widget, gnome-control-center, consistent file open dialogs, and so on.
For anyone who wants i3 but doesn't want to configure it, the only other option I know of was regolith:
https://regolith-desktop.com/ or https://regolith-linux.org/
This looks like a nice fit for my xfwm machine and I'm excited to try it.
https://spwhitton.name/tech/code/papersway/
This certainly looks interesting. Cannot comment on it's current state, as I still use bismuth on x11
Not a bad thing, I love Go. It surprised me is all.
But yes, it requires such extensibility support from the compositor, unlike this project that works with any X11 compositor because it just relies on EWMH.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean here or how it is related to hot corners.
The compositor itself can move windows anywhere (it is in full control). A client moving the windows of other clients is not permitted, although compositor-specific interfaces exist for this. There's no standard here because a stacking compositor implements completely different semantics from a tiling compositor. I'm sure that protocol extensions will come up for niche use cases over time.