Tiling Window Managers are Changing How I Use Computers

Give me hotkeys, or give me death!

Okay, so what is it?

Well, it’s kind of hard to explain and a little easier to see. I’ll provide a video below of me using the tiling window manager, but here’s my best shot at explaining.

Tiling Window Managers give you a unique way to control the open programs on your computer that revolve around a series of hotkeys. Whenever you open a application in a tiling window manager, you’ll notice that it immediately takes up the entire screen. Then if you were to press a hotkey to open another program, it will open and automatically perfectly split the two programs on your screen to take up equal amounts of space. From there, you have a series of hotkeys you can use to close the open programs, resize the windows, arrange them horizontal or vertically, send windows to other virtual desktops, and much more.

Looks cool, but why?

Well, mostly efficiency. Something you don’t consider while working on a computer is how much time using a mouse takes up. Using a tiling window manager allows you to control a lot of the functions that you’d normally do with your mouse and allows your hands to remain on the keyboard. Does this mean you’ll never use a mouse again on your computer? No, but you’re going to save lots of time on arranging your windows, closing and opening programs, etc etc. As an added bonus, tiling window managers also heavily revolve around the use of virtual desktops, or ‘spaces’. While watching the video above, in the top left, you’ll be able to see me switch between 10 different spaces with the press of a quick hotkey. The use of spaces allows you to effectively have 9 or 10 screens on your device at the same time.

Once you start to get the hang of the hotkeys and get to the point where you get muscle memory for what you’re doing, you start to get FAST at it. As an added bonus, you will feel way more efficient on a laptop, as you aren’t as limited by a trackpad and a single screen. A matter of fact, I recently went from have three monitors on my work computer and switched to just a single wide screen monitor. I’ve been doing this for close to a month, and genuinely, there have only been maybe two times where I missed having a second monitor.

Great, how do I get started?

Well, it depends on what OS you’re running. Luckily, there is a tiling window manager for every major Operating System. In addition to the tiling window manager, you will also need some form of hotkey program to create hotkeys for everything, and often you’ll want to pair some kind of status bar to go with everything so you can better keep track of the spaces you are working on. Below is the software I’m using for each major OS.

Windows

• Window Manager - GlazeWM

• Hotkey Manager - PowerToy’s Keyboard Manager

• Status Bar - Zebar (comes with GlazeWM)

MacOS

• Window Manager - Yabai

• Hotkey Manager - skhd

• Status Bar - Sketchybar

Linux

• Window Manager - Hyprland

• Hotkey Manager - Hyprland (key bindings are also managed by Hyprland)

• Status Bar - ashell

My Configs

I’m going to link my config files I use for these systems, but I would encourage you to come up with a configuration that makes the most sense for you and your workload. In general, I use basically the default keystrokes for GlazeWM and have made a configuration to match that on Yabai and Hyprland. The reason I did it this way is because Glaze uses alt as the primary modifier key. If you’re to use control or super/win/cmd as your main modifier key, you’ll run into more conflicts with your hotkeys this way when switching between operating systems. I’ve found that if you use alt as your main modifier key, you won’t run into as many shortcut conflicts.

Here is a link to my configurations.

https://github.com/bradywidener/TilingWMConfigs/tree/main

Enjoy!