It's been kind of buried, but KDE has the first steps of tiling mode built into it now, in addition to the default screen edge tiling (on KDE 5.27.8 on up). Meta + T to enable tile editor. Shift + window drag to move a window into a tile.
Hopefully a lot more coming, including different layouts per virtual desktop & full keyboard nav for the tiles. But it's a decent start.
SwayWM at least enables some use of mouse for editing the layout: Meta+left drag to re-arrange/group/ungroup/etc. tiles, for example, and of course, Meta+right drag to resize as in i3wm. To me, even just having the Meta+left drag option seems like a significant step up.
I really wanted to try plasma with i3 but the big problem I ran into was that different monitors can't have independent workspaces, which was a deal breaker :(
The advantages of tiling window managers are so tied to muscle memory, I’m not sure many people will want to switch from, say, sway or i3 or whatever. But at least new people will be able to give it a try.
I’m not sure how much work is involved in replacing the window manager inside a desktop environment. It would be nice to just drop sway into kde. Dunno if that is possible though.
> The advantages of tiling window managers are so tied to muscle memory, I’m not sure many people will want to switch from, say, sway or i3 or whatever.
Hear, hear !
I have been stucked with awesome for years now and even though I lost some functionalities between v2 and v4 I still can't switch. I tried i3 and regolith (was really looking for all the niceties of a DE: volume, bluetooth, screen, etc.) but tiling operations are not the same.
I wasn't exactly an awesomewm power user, so I'm sure there's awesomewm functionality you couldn't mimic in kde, but my most used keyboard shortcuts I was able to import in to kde.
I haven't tried KDE tiling out yet but tiling is not just about shortcuts, it's also about tile creation patterns, tags/virtual screens (dynamic or not) and of course default settings. I am not an awesome power user either, mostly basic settings plus dynamic tag management (empty tag are deleted automatically, new tag is created when switching to next tag, number of tag start at 1). The rest is just shortcut remapping and getting a systray with audio and network applets. No application based tag, no custom script to display bitcoin trading or media player widgets.
My only problem with KDE is the lack of a feature that Awesome has: I use 2 monitors and in KDE when I switch to another workspace the workspace switches on both monitors, while in Awesome when I switch to another tag only the tag on the active monitor changes.
Thanks for this. As a new user of Ubuntu I stumbled into the meta-T shortcut but couldn't find out how to take advantage of it. Shift-T is what I was missing. I didn't have the terminology I needed to search effectively either.
Hopefully a lot more coming, including different layouts per virtual desktop & full keyboard nav for the tiles. But it's a decent start.