I reinstalled Qtile and got serious this time. So two weeks back I felt like having a home makeover to shake my desktop up for real. There's not enough smartness found in a real tiling wm.

While in XFCE, I created shortcuts to resize windows in a tiled manner. The lack of the ability to discover things by pointing and clicking was debilitating. As soon as I went from the login screen into a desktop environment running only Qtile, I micro-panicked not knowing how to operate it. But asking emacs to manage the entire desktop feels one step too far.īut I was not serious about it then. I did consider running exwm from within emacs some time back. I chose that because it was highly recommended, apparently powerful and the fact that it's configuration script runs on Python is a great bonus. My first attempt at it was many months ago, starting with Qtile. There exist a whole class of them, but I didn't have to do much self-experimentation on the various choices on my own, Derek Taylor's DistroTube had done that so I don't have to. The solution to that is tiling window managers.

I figure let's just extend the entire idea all the way to the entire desktop. That's not the case with a typical desktop environment. In emacs windows are tiled, workspaces built in, keyboard navigation is first class citizen. Meantime the real operating system I've been actually living in is emacs. I like the well designed minimalism of it after decades of using GNOME in Ubuntu. A year or so ago my primary operating system has been Manjaro Linux, the primary XFCE flavor.

Windows tiling window manager