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GitHub - paperwm/PaperWM: Tiled scrollable window management for Gnome Shell (github.com)

submitted 11 months ago by juli@programming.dev to c/linux@programming.dev

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I've never seen it being shown here, so I thought I'd make a post.

I've never got into tiling window managers, there's a hurdle to get into them because I have to decide first which one I'll look into. I have to spend time without knowing if I even want it. And the first impressions weren't that awesome to jump over the hurdle. I was "satisfied with basic tiling" or super user friendly, minimal workload, tiling things. Usually, I played with awesome tiles or forge and they are great.

I stumbled upon PaperWM which extends the view to the side. It automatically appends windows to the side and you can scroll through them. You can do a lot and I still need to figure out how everything works but it's at least fun to explore it. I'm on GNOME 45 and so far I haven't seen any bug.

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[–] hallettj 5 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I've been using this for maybe a couple of years, and I love it! I like that windows stay at the sizes I set them to, and at the same time I can put as many windows in a workspace as I want.

PaperWM is not bug-free, but an active dev community has grown around it, and they do a lot of work to keep it running as smoothly as possible. That includes the essential task of working around breaking extension API changes when new Gnome releases are coming.

I've also been keeping an eye on Niri which applies the same idea to a standalone window manager. I haven't switched because Niri doesn't currently implement XWayland. But it looks like Wine is getting closer to native Wayland support so XWayland might not be a requirement for me for much longer.

[–] juli@programming.dev 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Do you know if there are window groups? That would be great as well

I see. I already found out that maximizing lags a little on my machine.

What's the point in moving from gnome to niri with the same functionality?

[–] hallettj 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

PaperWM has columns - you can move multiple windows into a column (Super+I by default, or Super+O to move a window out of a column). When you move windows left or right or resize horizontally the column moves or resizes as a group. That's the only feature that groups windows.

I mention Niri because I'm interested to see more implementations of the same idea. The only other scrolling window manager I know of is CardboardWM which is long dead. A native implementation like Niri might be able to explore ideas that are difficult to implement in an extension.

[–] juli@programming.dev 3 points 11 months ago

Got it, thx