Support side by-side sliding tiling like PaperWm?

[DanielJoyce]

I find most tiling WM to be useless as windows quickly get too small to be any good.

I really enjoy paperWm with it''s side by side tiling behavior and keyboard shortcuts to slide from one to the next. Windows can be tiled above and below, it's really slick and works great on wide screen monitors.

The one problem is their keyboard shortcuts seem to be harcoded.

If I could have a side-by-side tiling mode, shortcut to change application window width, that would be great.

[mmstick]

Pop Shell supports stacks, so you can have multiple windows attached to the same tile.

[micahscopes]

Pop Shell supports stacks, so you can have multiple windows attached to the same tile.

stacks seem cool but it's no replacement for the smooth continuous behavior of PaperWM. I found PaperWM to be a relief on my cognitive load.

[RobLW]

Just came across this after making a post in discussion about the same thing : https://github.com/pop-os/pop/discussions/3287 I heard a lot of positives about Pop, but now I've got it installed I find the tiling doesn't feel as good as PaperWM, especially when I disconnect the external monitor from my laptop and then have to move to a 14inch laptop screen. PaperWM feels nice on both laptop and external monitor. Unfortunately stacks isn't the same thing.

Tempted to install PaperWM but unsure if it will play nicely with the changes and extensions to Gnome that comes with Pop out of the box.

Does Pop Shell just provide tiling only, so I could turn that off and install paperWM, or is there more to the shell?

[MattKang]

+1 Moved from PopOS a year ago. At the time, I loved PopOS tiling. Was looking for something similar on my new distro and came across PaperWM. I miss PopOS (Nvidia support is amazing), and I'm very excited about COSMIC... but I can't leave PaperWM.

The problem with traditional tiling is that you are punished for having too many windows open with windows becoming smaller or even obscured as you open more of them, because you're trying to stuff everything into a finite space. Scrollable tiling is infinite space a la Hilbert's Hotel.

@mmstick Stacking is a solution, but it often feels like a needle in a haystack when searching for that one elusive window. Unlike with scrollable tiling, you can't maintain a sense of orientation as to where that last window was. In PaperWM, windows lie on a line and don't suddenly change relative positions and shapes when a new one opens. The new window just gets added to the end of the line. Instead of placing windows behind each other a la stacking, you are placing them beside each other. It's like when you're trying to talk to multiple people. It's a lot easier to have a conversation when everyone's in view, even if you're only focusing on one person at a time.

Also scrollable tiling completely removes my need for workspaces. Instead, I have a viewfinder, and I choose to position it so I'm looking at the relevant windows for what I'm working on. If I need to switch to another set of windows, I start panning, This continuous panning allows me to actually have "half workspaces". For example, there might be 3 windows I'm working with, but I'm really only needing to look at 1 of them all the time. PaperWM allows me to put the window I'm looking at in the middle and peek to the left or right of it as necessary.

|                |                |                |
|  50% screen    |   50% screen   |    50% screen  |
|  50% attention | 100% attention | 50% attention  |
|                |                |                |

You could imitate this with stacks by stacking the two 50% windows, but it's not as intuitive to me. Additionally when I'm switching with the arrow keys, I often have to "pass over" the window I don't care about while trying to get to the one I want. A minor nuisance but one that doesn't apply to scrollable tiling.