If that breaks your brain, I’ve got one for you: herbstluftwm for life.
I want no configuration file. The WM should run a program that configures and sets up everything. Not even as much a config as i3, or Sway. Nothing about the compositor should be configured or set unless it’s through a CLI client call.
There are dozens of compositors, pretty ones like Hyprland and novel ones like Niri, but always with the bespoke configuration files in whatever random config file format the maintainer has a thing for.
River looks similar to herbstluftwm in the configuration area. I did try it a few months ago; I don’t remember why it didn’t work out - lacking multi-monitor support, maybe? But since it’s in active development I’ll have to try it again.
After using Linux almost exclusively for over 20 years and at some point used nearly all of the desktops and window managers that exist for X; and having come to the conclusion that - in general - configuration files for long-running services are bad design, and that nearly all services should be runtime-configurable with tooling, I just won’t use a compositor with a static configuration. Hot reloading is a work-around hack. I3’s live restart is a pretty decent solution, and i3-mesg is close, but the gaps eventually become obvious.
If that breaks your brain, I’ve got one for you: herbstluftwm for life.
I want no configuration file. The WM should run a program that configures and sets up everything. Not even as much a config as i3, or Sway. Nothing about the compositor should be configured or set unless it’s through a CLI client call.
There are dozens of compositors, pretty ones like Hyprland and novel ones like Niri, but always with the bespoke configuration files in whatever random config file format the maintainer has a thing for.
River looks similar to herbstluftwm in the configuration area. I did try it a few months ago; I don’t remember why it didn’t work out - lacking multi-monitor support, maybe? But since it’s in active development I’ll have to try it again.
After using Linux almost exclusively for over 20 years and at some point used nearly all of the desktops and window managers that exist for X; and having come to the conclusion that - in general - configuration files for long-running services are bad design, and that nearly all services should be runtime-configurable with tooling, I just won’t use a compositor with a static configuration. Hot reloading is a work-around hack. I3’s live restart is a pretty decent solution, and i3-mesg is close, but the gaps eventually become obvious.