Sorry to disrupt the narrative, I'm late to the party here.
To give my answer to the original question: I used Stacking for a long time until I discovered Tiling. However, I've only ever used laptops and, as has already been said, with a small laptop screen tiling is preferrable to (1) make use of the limited screen real estate; and (2) to avoid using the track pad or the need for a mouse.
In the beginning I mainly used spectrwm
as it is dead simple to configure and use. I then briefly switched to FrankenWM
after Pin showed me some of its awesome features. However, the need to recompile every time you make a change is a no go for me. I tinker to much so I needed a wm with a standard config file.
I then found sdorfehs
which is heavily based on ratpoisen
. I'd never used a manual tiling manager until I used sdorfehs
. This has completely changed my workflow and drastically reduced my time wasted on tweaking layouts and overall worrying about where my windows are placed. Like a few others, I've started using full screen terminals/apps on each virtual desktop, although I do also like to split the screen into two terminals to see things side by side. Yes, it takes a few more key strokes using a manual tiling wm where you need to hit the modifyer (like in tmux) before you can input your action keybinds. However, for many regularly used scripts or actions you can set direct keybinds in the config, such as launching dmenu
with Mod+d
I dont dislike stacking window managers, infact I look forward to the day I have a desktop computer with a big monitor and a dedicared mouse! I will prbably get stuck into fvwm
once that happens (or I'll just use plan9 and get a 3 button mouse).
I dont see myself changing to a stacking wm again on my laptop, I just dont see the point (besides pretty screenshots). I really enjoy being forced to use the keyboards to manipulate the windows. In dynamic wm's I would often find myself using the trackpad to move/resize windows simply because I could (and often because I forgot the key bindings). sdorfehs
has a builtin cheatsheet which is activated with Ctrl+a ?
. I dont need this anymore because I quckly learned the keysbindings out of necessity.
On another note, tmux
is handy for when you want to launch specific applications in a full screen window with preconfigured split panes. But I never just launch tmux
(or any other multiplexer for that matter) and split panes manually. This feels redundant while using a manual tiling wm. I also have no need for attaching or detaching sessions because I'm never really ssh'ing into any other macines.
Thats all... sorry for the long story. 🙂