Between the people I know everyone who used IRC are looking much more fondly at window managers

So you don't use a window manager? Just pure X? Or is this a joke based on Wayland calling its window managers compositors?

@Oktokolo you dug way too deep there, friend. Internet relay chat is mostly text based, barring any GUI fluff. Window managers are favored by people preferring keyboard centric workflow. Put 2 and 2 together

@olezhka Window managers manage windows - like doing the iconizing, maximising, pinning, resizing,... of windows. In X, the window manager is also responsible for drawing the title bar and borders of windows. In Wayland, the beast is called compositor and it is a mandatory component.

If you are on a Unix or Linux and see windows with title bars, you are using a window manager (or compositor when on Wayland).

And keyboard-centric window managers are more of a niche actually. Most are pretty mous-centric for obvious reasons...

@Oktokolo you're correct, though many people drop the "tiling" in "tiling window managers", the latter probably being what op means

@ess3sq thank you. Totally slipped my mind. Yes

Well there is the desktop environment vs window manager thing. Quite a few of them are tiling but that is not a requirement. fluxbox is such an example.

@Oktokolo there is of course also the technical designation even the default X window manager is a window manager...

@ess3sq With the "tiling" thrown in, it actually makes sense. I wished there was a tiling window manager built for conservatives like me who like to control GUIs with a pointing device. They seem to only target people who like memorizing keyboard shortcuts for everything...

@Oktokolo yep, sorry for confusion - tiling. I recommend awesomewm as it has the cheat sheet you can invoke that dynamically lists whatever commands you configured. Downside, it's on X

@Oktokolo well, using the mouse partially defies the concept... There are two ways to reach a middle ground. Either a non-tiling window manager (though also not a desktop environment) such as openbox, which allows for an efficient mouse-based workflow... Or the other way around, a full blown desktop env. such as GNOME and KDE with tiling enabled. GNOME has an extension for this, KDE idk if tiling comes out of the box or needs an extension. Have you tried any of these and if yes what do you think about them? I don't use any of these setups but am interested in opinions.

@ess3sq I actually didn't know, that tiling is an option in the two big desktop environments. I chose XFCE back then when i switched to Gentoo and didn't find any non-keyboard-centric tiling window managers.

I am pretty sure, that using the mouse to configure the tiling grid and snap windows into other cells could be pretty flexible and intuitive. My grid isn't complex - just three columns with the last one split horiziontally. Sometimes i would drag a window border to span two columns. Sometimes i would want to adjust the column size for specific workloads. Just dragging grid lines and windows around with the pointer would be fine - sortof like it is done with all the non-tiling window managers, but with predefined cells that are autofilled by windows and snapping to cells instead of other windows' borders.

What is IRC?

@Oktokolo if you use gnome paperwm might be exactly what you want.

@olezhka I'm actually against anything not Wayland. Their is no reason to keep using X. For me it's the same as recommending Python 2 stuff when there's already python 3.6±. I think i would recommend sway for Vim bindings lovers.

@hjk101 agreeed, I only came into linux world a few months back, was on awesome initially, got cozy. And the learned of wayland and how it's X's de facto successor. Tried swaywm and now settling with riverwm.

But awesome is pretty user friendly in terms of feature richness so far

@Ohiorenua lmgtfy its internet relay chat

@Ohiorenua Damn you just made me feel old 🤣. It's still heavily used though (often as a protocol under the hood) and slash commands in games and instant messaging programs like slack come from IRC.
Basically it's the first significant instant messaging/chat thing before WWW was even invented. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

@hjk101 so it is a command line chat app?

@hjk101 not every app supports Wayland though. Especially proprietary stuff like zoom sucks on it. Obviously that's not Wayland's fault, but it does mean that we are not ready to throw out X yet

@Ohiorenua no it's a protocol, many apps/programs implement it

@Ohiorenua nope it's a protocol like Http for chat. Same as FTP for files originally. There are of course lots of command line clients but graphical as well sometimes its embedded like in game chats

@hjk101 paperwm looks more like a scrolling window manager than a tiling one ;)

But it isn't that much of a deal for me anyways - i abuse window border snapping and title doubleclick to macximize in free space for tiling since years. It is bearable and other window managers have to at least beat that (which they don't even seem to try at all).

Would like to finally switch to Wayland too. But XFCE will probably not be Wayland-compatible for some more years and most other "desktop environments" try hard to emulate the look and feel of OSX, iOS or Android while i want more a Windows-XP-like looks and feel. Also don't want to spend a week to properly mixmatch and configure my desktop environment again... Guess i postpone that until i get an AMD GPU and switch my gaming to Linux too.

@ess3sq that is exactly why I compared it to Python 2. No matter how long you give shit will depend on it.
X apps run rather well with a few exceptions that need to go though actual secure channels.
Wayland is 14 years old, heavily adopted and quite mature.
So yes throw X out of the window and either the apps can't say they have a Linux solution anymore or they actually spend a month to get it working.
It's that our crappy multi-window support and tearing on X forever.