What is a Tiling Window Manager ? and why is it used with arch btw
Tiling Window Managers(WM) essentially manage the windows for your applications inside of tiles. These tiles can then be moved around through keystrokes / keybinds and allow you to utilize multiple workspaces.
It's heavily a non traditional way of doing Desktop Environment computing but is very popular in the arch linux community with the rise of ricing with hyprland.
Why Tiling WM are amazing
Tiling WM are great, it's actually the same reason why I learned vim motions once you have a decent setup, all of your keybinds have purpose and reason for why you have things in certain spots.
For me I keep my terminal on workspace 1, Browser on 2, Virtualbox on 3, and discord on 7. My setup I can easily press mainMod(windows key) and 1<->0 on the key board to get where I need to go. Hyprland or any Tiling WM feels a whole lot faster because you know where everything is already.
Also with the customization aspect, over time if you use a template for a Tiling WM (which i've done and still do), you'll find yourself annoyed with how things are setup in some spots or wanting to change it. The best part is that you can change it ! That's the whole point, whether you go from a template to your own monster build it's yours!
- This is just my opinion and you can do whatever you'd
Side note about ricing
Ricing is this thing in linux where you stylize your desktop environment and customize almost everything about yourself. It truely puts the Personal in Personal Computers.
Ricing isn't distro specific either, but arch does have a lot of Tiling WM support and options available.
Here's the Hyprland Rice template that I started out with (that will be available when selecting hyprland as a DE):
and here are some others on hyprlands wiki:
one that I really want to try is: HyDE
- https://github.com/HyDE-Project/HyDE
I personally dont find the keybind intuitive but i might steal some of the dot files here and combine it with the keybinds of JaKooLits