
Way Cooler tiling window manager - Ianvdl
http://way-cooler.org/
======
actsasbuffoon
At a high level, this sounds a lot like a Wayland version of Awesome:
[https://awesomewm.org](https://awesomewm.org)

Both are tiling window managers that are extensible through Lua, support
D-Bus, etc.

If you want to check out something conceptually similar, but aren’t ready for
Wayland, consider trying Awesome.

~~~
angrygoat
From the docs:

> Way Cooler comes in two primary flavors: i3 and awesome.

> The i3 flavor is set up like a default i3 install, with the same keybindings
> and tiling algorithm. The only difference between this flavor and actual i3
> is that the primary configuration format is still Lua.

Sounds very good, I'm an i3 user and I had a lot of trouble getting Sway going
on my Ubuntu Xenial box, so I'm going to give this a whirl.

------
dimatura
I've been using tiling window managers for over 10 years, and for this time
has been spent on ratpoison (after brief stints with wmii, awesome and dwm).

Despite i3/xmonad/bspwm/etc/etc I keep going back to ratpoison for two
features I haven't found elsewhere:

\- chained key commands, a la emacs. E.g., I use C-a b to open a bash
terminal. I _do_ use non-chained commands, like Mod4+n to go to the next
window, but chained key commands can be much easier to do one-handed, and so
far it seems ratpoison is the only to offer built in support for this.

\- manual window arrangement. I don't care for the window layouts most tiling
WM's since dwm/xmonad seem to use.

Until I see those features in another wm I'll probably remain one of the
handful of ratpoison users.

~~~
mbrock
After using Ratpoison as my only window manager starting in 2004, I've now
switched to Stumpwm for the better multiscreen support. (It's the successor to
Ratpoison, written in Common Lisp.)

~~~
LamdaNomad
Stumpwm really is great for multiple monitors, I have an 8 screen setup and it
works flawlessly.

------
splittingTimes
Privately using dwm [1] for many years now and never looked back.

But having to working under a MS Windows 10 setup now, I was wondering:

Is there anything equivalent for MS Windows?

===

[1] [http://dwm.suckless.org/](http://dwm.suckless.org/)

~~~
digi_owl
Kinda.

Windows 10 has the ability to tile windows by dragging one of them to the left
or right screen edge, or corners (dragging one to the top edge maximize it).

But they can only resize nearby windows when there are a vertical split
between two windows.

If i try using a full height window on one side, and two half height on the
other, Windows fails to resize the neighbors to match any changes i make.

~~~
isaac_is_goat
You might want to look into Aqua Snap, it solves a lot of those resizing
problems. I'm not affiliated, just a happy customer.

[http://www.nurgo-software.com/products/aquasnap](http://www.nurgo-
software.com/products/aquasnap)

------
Apreche
It's going to be a tough battle if they want to win my heart away from i3.

~~~
actsasbuffoon
i3 is my #1 reason for wanting to switch from MacOS to Linux. I love a good
tiling window manager, and the workarounds to emulate a tiling WM in MacOS
just aren’t close enough to the real thing.

~~~
bathtub
I did this recently for the same reason.

Do not wait and get a Linux system with i3 tomorrow. You will be so much
faster and more structured in your daily workflow than with Alt-Tab.

A nice side effect: Apps feel much faster than on OSX. I don't know why but
everything is snappier and just more resonsive despite a much weaker CPU and
same hires screen on the Linux system. Especially the terminal rendering and
application switching which is instant.

~~~
Null-Set
It might have to do with the transition animations in OSX. I found a long time
ago that turning off the animations in Windows makes a system feel a while lot
more responsive.

------
peletiah
Surprising there's no comment on XMonad yet. Well, it needs a replacement as
soon as Wayland is going to become established.

------
sfar
I was a little disappointed to find out it's based on the C WLC library rather
than being a full Rust implementation.

~~~
mastax
There's some complications involved with switching, you might find this thread
interesting: [https://github.com/way-cooler/way-
cooler/issues/248](https://github.com/way-cooler/way-cooler/issues/248)

------
dkersten
My faovurite window manager ever is GOOMWWM, which is a manual[1] tiling
window manager with some stacking window manager features, is extremely
keyboard centric, lightweight, customisable and easy to use. Its also tiny, so
if you want to hack the source, its not that dificult to figure out.

Its sadly not actively developed (the latest github commit was 2 years ago),
but in my experience, its been very stable and I’ve used it for years without
any issues (although I stopped using it almost 2 years ago when I started
using a mac for work).

I haven’t tried way cooler, but if it were to let me work like I did in
goomwwm (especially manual tiling), I’d be sold. Dbus as the integration
mechanism sounds interesting and I like rust and lua too.

[1] I never liked automatic tiling personally

------
usernam
Does anybody know what's the _current_ status of window decorations in
wayland? Client-side decorations was an incredibly poor choice in the original
design. From the screenshot I cannot tell if it's just a custom theme or the
"wm" is drawing them.

~~~
sfar
AFAIK it's unchanged. The Wayland spec doesn't really concern itself with
decorations. It's up to the apps and compositor to figure it out.

QT allows decorations to be disabled and so works well with a tiling
compositor. GTK doesn't. There are various GTK patches and hacks floating
around to address this but nothing upstream. Older software generally works
well by virtue of pre-dating client-side decorations.

~~~
usernam
I don't expect anything anymore from GTK given it's current track record. The
latest issue I discovered was the 'letter' to filename shortcut you _used to
have_ in file dialogs. It now triggers recursive search instead. Incredibly
irritating, especially when used with large and/or FUSE directories, _even_
considering there's a one line patch to allow customization though dconf which
has been ignored since more than one year.

GTK 3 has been downhill usability-wise for me. One of the primary reasons I've
stopped as a developer to use it entirely.

~~~
okbake
The recursive search is frustrating. I'm so used to doing <first few
letters><enter> to navigate from the root directory all the way down to what
I'm looking for. It's not only the small hangs while it searches but also the
information overload with all of the results when I'm only ever looking for a
specific sub directory in the directory I'm currently in. I guess I'm so used
to using it as a hotkey instead of a search.

~~~
usernam
The additional problem is that the search results are also incrementally
updated. On an open dialog, I had in three different occasions click on a
result just to automatically select an unwanted [new] result.

Also, the path bar is long gone. It used to support tab completion, which was
actually faster than selecting files and/or searching for them. I don't know
what they're thinking.

The list of gripes I have with GTK 3 is increasing at each release.

------
majewsky
This goes on my "need to check out" list. I've been toying with the idea of
switching to a tiling window manager for a long time, but I've held it off
over not wanting to switch window managers yet again when making the move to
Wayland.

------
iLemming
I spend most of my time working in OS X and I use Hammerspoon. It is really an
awesome tool. It allowed me to establish truly keyboard-centric workflow. Not
just for managing windows, a lot more. I also have Linux machine at home, I
don't use it a lot yet I've been thinking about developing better way to work
in Linux - something that lets me keep my hands in "the home row". Can someone
recommend a tool similar to Hammerspoon?

------
sofaofthedamned
God knows how to install on Fedora, install script didn't work for me on my
test box (installs but doesn't appear on list of WMs in login screen)

~~~
awinder
You likely need to add a new file under /usr/share/xsessions, copy an existing
one to a way cooler oriented version

~~~
sofaofthedamned
Gotya, thank you!

------
pjmlp
> configurable using Lua,

Oh, brings back memories from when I used to have Sawfish installed.

------
stephen123

      Way Cooler is designed from the ground up to be secure. Rust 
      prevents Way Cooler from ever having a data race, dangling 
      pointers, or a segfault. Large classes of security 
      vulnerabilities, such as from buffer overruns or use after 
      free, are a thing of the past.
    

haha nice selling point. Could add this to any app built with a memory managed
language. =P

~~~
fnord123
Data races are possible in memory managed languages. And segfaults are thrown
over the fence to the runtime. I'm sure anyone who has used Java in anger has
seen segfaults. I certainly have.

Personally, I think the statement is too strong. Rust is not immune to these
things as the compiler is victim to all the realities of software development
that all projects face. But it certainly does dramatically reduce the bug
vectors.

~~~
wuch
Yeah, I suppose for the end user I doesn't matter if program stopped working
because of segmentation fault or a panic. Though, if one were to choose on of
those issues, then obviously runtime errors are preferable over memory-safety
problems that might lead to an arbitrary code execution.

BTW, in Java data races do not cause undefined-behaviour. In fact there is no
undefined behaviour in Java at all (as specified at least, in practice as you
and many others have observed things may work quite differently).

~~~
mort96
Who said anything about UB? You can easily fuck up a parallel program in a
nondeterministic may without UB. If two threads are in a deadlock, each
waiting for the other thread to release a resource it needs, nobody cares that
it wasn't caused by UB.

