Comment by jasoneckert 18 hours ago
I think the biggest takeaway from this blog post is that developers and other professionals should take more note of the tiling window managers available on Linux like Sway and Hyprland - they are insanely fast and customizable to exactly what we need to be more productive.
I'm a Sway user (ironically on Fedora Asahi Remix on a Mac) and I won't have it any other sway... er... I mean way.
I switched from MacOS (from a 12 year old first generation retina MBP) to Arch and started out with hyprland. It was really nice initially while I mostly used terminals, a browser or launched Steam. But when I needed to do some paperwork (taxes, stuff involving wide spreadsheets) I often ran into trouble, e.g. when I needed to read some numbers off a pdf quickly. Rearranging the tiling to have everything in appropriate size was rather slow. I often use overlapping windows in such cases, where I only need to see parts of a document and the floating tiles in hyprland just didn’t work for me (not as easy to arrange and so it felt clumsy). I moved on to KDE and that has been working great for half a year now. Maybe I‘m missing some functionality or just didn’t take the time to get used to it - stuff needed to get done ;)
I got a laptop recently where I installed Arch / Hyprland (not Omarchy) but I know what you mean about overlapping windows. I do this all the time on Windows where I overlap windows and then toggle some of them as "always on top" to optimize whatever workflow I'm doing at the time.
The good news is Hyprland supports this quite nicely. I don't know when you last tried it but it's easy to float windows as needed in a dynamic way. You can assign a keybinding to toggle floating on a specific window and then you can move and resize it while holding either mouse button.
It also has a feature called "pin" to make something always on top which you can assign to a keybinding to toggle this as needed. Floating windows are already pinned by default on top of tiled windows so you only need to deal with this when you have 2+ overlapping floating windows.
Combining floating and pin together lets you overlap things in whatever way works best for you in a config-less way.
Optionally you can also pre-assign specific apps to always float or be pinned in your config file and toggle them with keybinds too.
If you want to have tiling but don’t like windows being automatically resized or having to do any resize at all, try niri. It’s a scrolling tiling window manager based on PaperWM. It is in the Arch repository and a KDE plugin called Karousel also exists on the same PaperWM paradigm.
There’s a second monitor for those times when it’s an unquestionable benefit. Most of the time having multiple windows open is inefficient use of screen real estate (I either have two or three panes in the IDE - the terminal is also here, a browser with console open, some db query tool with wide tables or corp chat, which I explicitly do not want to see when I’m working on anything of substance.)
I feel like I completely missed the boat on tiling WMs; I was a Linux user since '97 to 2002, and then for the most part Mac/Windows since then. I just deal with the chaotic madness of floating windows. I did try to spend a year on Linux as my work laptop with sway, and while tiling was just okay, I just felt less productive compared to my colleagues that were wizzes with it. Also using Ghidra with sway was incredibly painful, mostly due to the whole Java AWT thing, but it was a necessary part of my job.
I'm sure there's certain things that I do that are inefficient with floating windows - even despite with macos now having a bit of tiling management, but it's just easier to deal with on the brain. I'm not really organised or methodical for the most part and I kind of like it that way.