Window managers

Window managers are the best thing since sliced bread for those who care about desktop ergonomics. Why use the mouse to manipulate windows when the keyboard or computer can do it much faster? Here are my opinions on the window managers I have tried. For context I use linux desktops at both work and home, and have been using window managers for over a year now. This is really no time at all, many linux users are used to (tiling) window managers and have been using them for decades. I am a bit newer to the game, but have tried a number of these now. Below we will go over sway/i3, hyprland and niri, the new kid on the block.

What is a window manager anyway?

A window manager is a piece of software that will manage your windows for you on your desktop. You will be familiar with floating window managers, the macos and windows default window managers are floating. This means new windows will spawn on top of the current windows. This is a bad design for a number of reasons.

A tiling window manager splits each window horizontally or vertically, and always fills the entire screen with windows, even if only one window is open. This means you can navigate through all the windows with just keyboard commands, and you can resize them all with just keyboard commands.

Every good window manager also heavily uses workspaces. Windows ship a workspace and have made it prominent in times during the windows 10 cycle. It is something people often don't use. I don't blame them, it can be a pain to switch through them with the mouse and they feel like seperate workstations at times. I likely didn't put enough time into these when I used Windows.

Sway/i3

I have included i3 here, not because I have not used it directly, but because I have used sway. Sway is a reimplementation of i3 but for wayland rather than x11. i3 is truly a staple for linux desktop users. i3 has been around since 2009, so well over 15 years now. When you use i3 is is very clear that a vim user wrote it. There are quite a lot of complicated keybinds that seem normal. The windows do not dynamically tile without extension scripts. This is fine, and actually very nice to use once you get into it. It is much like vim in that sense. When you get up to speed it feels very natural to use.

i3 also has a very cool stacking and tabbing feature. Meaning you can stack windows on top of one another and use the keyboard to bring different windows to the foreground. This is very nice to use once you get into it. The workspaces are also a vital part of getting work done in i3. Workspaces feel pretty seamless (there are no animations in i3 so everything moves instantly).

Hyprland

Hyprland is a much more modern window manager (I know it's a wayland compositor, it's easier to refer to it like this for this post). When using it you can really feel the i3 lineage. Hyprland is very different though. It uses dynamic tiling (you don't use the keyboard to tell it where to open a new window) and it has animations built in. It is very customisable and you can get some really cool animations going on it. You can apparently do stacking and tabbing on hyprland, but I have not done this before. Hyprland can feel very smooth at times and the animations are pretty cool. It can be quite opinionated, as can i3, though hyprland is more easily extensible.

Niri

Niri is the new kid on the block. Niri doesn't use tiling window management. It uses infinite scroll. Windows open to the left, and when you fill up the screen you can keep going as far as you want to the right. Kind of like a carousel. It feels very nice to use, though I'm not a huge fan on 32:9 which is quite strange. I enjoy it on 21:9 but on the larger screen don't find myself needing more space in a given workspace.

Conclusion

Window managers are a very nice upgrade to any linux desktop. I like to use sway when I'm working as it is the most snappy and simple, niri on my laptop and hyprland on my desktop. I find hyprland can have weird behaviour more than niri. Niri is a super clean new rust codebase so I would imagine it's less error prone, but that's just my own theory.