I was one or two years on Arch with i3 and all was great except when an app (eg a browser or Inkscape) opens a dialogue/modal/popup or whatever and this got stretched over the entire pane, yuck. AFAIK this could be configured somehow but I found configuration not as mature and rock-solid as with tmux or nvim but good though. It was rather a rabbit-hole.
While I prefer the paradigm of tiling wms I eventually stuck with Windows (and WSL2) with its built-in window management but yeah.
That's odd, I've been using i3 for years now and modals always open as a floating window. Even GIMP (and its many windows) works fine. I don't remember tweaking anything in particular to make it work.
Nice to hear and need to try it again. I stopped using it 2017. Another gripe I had with i3 was that setting up proper hidpi support was a mess, maybe this improved as well. I know that the latest Ubuntu got here quite well, allowing also 25% steps etc.
Yeah hidpi on Linux is pretty underwhelming and it seems that nobody really cares. I think Windows needed years to match macOS and is now on the same level. Still Windows notebooks barely have more then 200dpi unless there are from the premium segment. Whatever, at least the software side is great now. But on Linux, Ubuntu just had until last year hidpi only in 100% steps paired with dozens of glitches here and there. Sad since especially a terminal looks just terrific in 300dpi (UHD on 13" or 8k on 32").
I think you're probably right, but my experience (Sway on Arch) has been nothing other than pretty excellent.
It supports fractional scaling and different scales for different attached screens.. You have to tell the system you want it (`swaymsg 'output <x> scale 1.5'`) but it works.
Just checked out Sway's intro video, this looks promising! Would you mind to elaborate if Sway is ready for being a daily driver + how is multi-monitor support (all monitors same dpi and also with different dpi levels).
Tiled windows managers have issues though. Last time I tried i3wm for example, there was no default support for sleep, energy saving and hardware keyboard shortcuts and you had to take care of all of that instead of the usual GNOME/KDE to do it for you. The best option is to install tiled windows managers plugins within GNOME or KDE on Linux.
i3 is one of those things that supports everything, you just have to configure it. If you want i3 with sane defaults and a pretty style out of the box, you should try i3-regolith[1]
I use dwm, you get keybinding support inside the config file and then you can use scripts or commands to manage everything else.
Dwm isn't for everybody, you modify the c source and compile to get the changes you want. The best part is that the source is small enough to understand for when you want to do something to it.
I found i3 to be the easiest WM for setting arbitrary keyboard shortcuts. The .config file makes it really convenient, and you can just set the key to run an arbitrary shell command.
For those who enjoy experimenting with window managers, might I suggest PaperWM for your next experiment?
Instead of fitting all your windows within your monitor's boundaries, PaperWM sets all windows to take full height and gives you an infinite horizontal axis to arrange them on. I'm thoroughly enjoying it and vastly prefer it to tiling and floating windows
The big gain is that you don't have to give up all those gui apps as they blend in next to the terminal apps quite well.