Comment by phkx

Comment by phkx 11 hours ago

2 replies

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 ;)

nickjj 6 hours ago

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.

wongogue 10 hours ago

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.