Which Tiling Window Managers do you like, and why?

i3 and sway

HYPRLAND !

Need to figure out making it work with nvidia 😭
- Here are my dot files https://github.com/visnudeva/dot-files
- I don't have any problem with hyprland on Nvidia, I didn't have to tweak anything, it worked out of the box, I just installed it on Archcraft.

XMonad. Been using it for almost a decade, and very powerful. I3 I hear is also good.

Same here, but I'm about ready to accept Wayland... Seems like sway is the best option?
- Sway is more of an i3 clone. I used to use xmonad, but recently I have been using river with wayland. It has similar defaults to xmonad, also being a dwm clone
I prefer the way XMonad handles multimonitor workspaces, but left for Sway due to wayland support.
- need to give it a try. I'm stuck in the past times lol
I haven't used XMonad in a long time, but it was my go-to for a few years. It was solid. The main issue is that you configure it in Haskell, and I don't know Haskell.

i3 until the day I die

Edit: Why? Because I love how easy it is to get working, it's a nice balance between features and simplicity for me, and IPC features are great for some QoL plugins. Its configuration file format is simple enough, I like lua with wezterm and neovim but I don't really see the point with a WM, I just need to see my windows when I want, the way I want, and to switch to others.

Can you list some QoL mods for i3? I have been using autotiling for the last few months and it's great.
- Link to my reply in another sibling comment
I too would be interested to know what plugins you use.

I love i3 and have used it for years and find myself fruitlessly using the most common keybinds in windows at work.

But my gripes over i3 are:

If I don't know the name of the command, say a specific settings window, etc - then I'm hosed if I need it.

It doesn't come with a lock screen by default, you need a plugin for it
- Here's a list of plugins that may be useful:
  
  kitti3: quake style dropdown terminal
  
  tdrop: the same as kitti3, but I moved to wezterm due to kitty's design choice and tdrop fits the bill, it's also wm agnostic.
  
  i3-volume: integrates with dunst for me to pop up volume status when I change volume via keybinds.
  
  autotiling: A must have in my opinion. I seldom have more than 2 windows on a monitor, since I have two monitors and utilize other workspace, but there are times when I temporarily have multiple windows open and too lazy to group them into stacks or tabs.
  
  i3expo: I heard people have success with this as an alt-tabber with visualization. I just use dmenu and have scripts for window switching.
  
  wmfocus: quite useful if you have multiple monitors and multiple windows on each, instead of doing Super + h a few times to move to the left most window, I just use wmfocus and hop to it immediately.
  
  i3-extras: I just found this, perhaps it's of use.
  
  Regarding your gripe #1, I don't quite understand? Do you mean you don't know the command of a program to type into your terminal to launch?
  
  And gripe #2, if you mean i3lock, I'm okay with that, I like that i3 follows UNIX philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well, and because of that good i3lock forks exist! If it was baked into i3 then this might not be the case.
  
  For i3-lock, I currently use i3lock-fancy-rapid, it's a weird name lol, but it is still dependent on the i3lock-color binary, which itself is a fork of i3lock.

I usually use tiling add-ons for Gnome or KDE. So pop-shell or bismuth.

i3 all the way

Sorry to be the boring i3 user but it's a rock solid TWM. Plus I am using the autotiling mod and now it's even better :D
This is the way.
i3 aswell, its great.

Not sure if this counts as a tiling window manager, but I spend most of my time in emacs in full screen mode. I can create, delete, resize, and swap my windows.

I'm not sure my solution counts either - I just use quicktile with default KDE, because it has the tiling bits that I need and the config file was simple enough that I didn't have to spend a whole day setting it up. I need working memory for other things besides keyboard shortcuts.
Are you aware that Emacs can be a full-featured window manager.

Pop!_OS 20.04 LTS... I love how it combines tiling and stacking. Sure I could use workspaces instead of stacks, but with stacks... I can use both!

I've also used EXWM and am going to give it another whirl after I upgrade to emacs 28 with native comp

Does this support independent workspaces on each monitor? That's what kept me from using i3 on Plasma :(

Sway, but single window capture and the animations make hyprland very tempting...

Starting with i3 as my first, i tried a bunch of different ones. Xmonad and Qtile were the ones i liked the most but Qtile was buggy and Xmonad while working was super confusing to configure with haskell.

Also tried AwesomeWM, it felt a bit buggy to me in terms of window handling and DWM was just too complicated to patch and even with patches it was too basic

Ended up going back to i3, and then moved over to Sway.

Today I use Plasma, but if I need a tiling wm I use awesome. It's so great and customizable. If you're fine with Lua, is easy to config.

i3 is what I've been using the past few years. I've tried others, but I always end back up with i3 as I've found nothing else to be as simple and efficient for my workflow, with 12 workspaces across 2 monitors.

I really like dwm. It doesn't seem too popular so maybe the other ones are better but it was the first one I tried so the others feel weird to me. I like the idea behind suckless in general though.

i3 gang rise up!

I've only tried i3 and it just works, so I stuck with it. After learning the hotkeys it never seems to get in the way (at least for my usage). Riced it a bit. Then some polybar sparkled in there. A wallpaper. What more can a guy want?

DWM

I’ve been using i3. Nothing super advanced but the config is easy and being able to reload in place is nice

i3 is the one I keep coming back to

@cyclohexane for me it was and always will be bspwm. Once I had it configured it was the coziest of cozies.

LeftWM, because it's a really nice community to get involved with, and i like rust so i contributed a bit to the project

Recently I have been using river. It's extremely easy to configure via a shell script, and it's very fast and stable. It's another dwm clone

It's not exactly a dwm clone, it's way better than that. It takes all the best parts from dwm and bspwm, and I've been loving it so far
- The binary split tree is bspwm's best and most important feature imo. I'm sad river doesn't follow that model.

DWM due to it's suckless nature

I started with for a bit awm, however i am giving qtile a try since im learning how to code python so good practice.

I used StumpWM for many years. It was great for most of my workflow and, being written in Common Lisp, you can recompile parts of it while it's running (I didn't do this often but it was a cool feature).

PaperVM. Works under gnome and has everything i need

My heart still belongs to enlightenment/e17 but I've been using i3 for the past few years, and then hyprland for the last 4 months or so. It's working out well.

Man e16 was the shit. If it played nice with hot-plugging monitors, I'd still use it today. It had some awesome themes, too.

What's e17 like? I've truthfully never used it, though I daily Terminology as a terminal emulator.
- Ahhh, e17 - I've got memories of building it from either cvs or svn at the time as soon as it was announced by rasterman on Slashdot.
  
  e17 was my daily driver for a long time. It looked very pretty, before compositing was even a thing on the desktop, all without sacrificing performance. The biggest downside was that it wrote its configs as binary blobs which frequently broke as new development releases came out.

I use sway because when I came back after a long break, it seemed to be the one to go with. I kind of miss awesome, though.

EXWM. I am a longtime Emacs user so merging the concepts of Emacs buffers and X windows is a huge benefit. Only one set of keybindings to worry about, all of my Emacs window management stuff works for X windows too. One less external dependency to worry about too. In a new environment (like when starting a new job etc) as long as I have my Emacs config I am good to go.

I'll have to give it a try again. I played with it a while back, but I was happy with GNOME at the time. What underlying version of emacs are you using? native comp?
- EXWM is not particularly picky about Emacs versions or performance. I used to run with nativecomp but ended up turning it off since I value stability over performance. (nativecomp was pretty stable but I had some occasional issues)
  
  The biggest caveat is that you must be very comfortable with whatever Emacs buffer/window management setup you use since you will be relying on that even more.

I tried i3 back in 2019 and I've been using it ever since on my desktop.

Currently, I am using DWL and it is pretty nice. After moving to Wayland, I tried to use Sway for a while, but it does not really fit into my workflow well. But to be honest, even DWL is missing some things I want, and I am not really a fan of that it is written and configured in C. I am planning on trying to write my own tiling window manager in Rust when I have some time.

Sway with autotiling and a few nifty scripts (launch or focus and such) and Waybar. The combination of having scratchpads, sensible autotiling along with titlebars and the wonderful world of wayland is supreme.

i3 because it works well with few config changes.

Been using the same config since 2015 more or less.

I'm on Hyprland (wayland compositer, wl-roots based). Prior to the wayland transition I was on dwm. Hyprland offers a dynamic tiling layout just like dwm, which was my main selling point. The dev is very active and hyprland is gaining maturity rapidly (more than alternatives like dwl or river did at the time I checked it out). I also tried i3 and sway, but they don't quite cut it for me as they don't do dynamic tiling out of the box.

When I was using it, I LOVED Hyprland. It was my most flawless experience with Wayland on an Nvidia GPU. I switched off of it however, because I primarily game on my PC and a lot of games just didn't work and I did not want to have to figure out how to get them working all the time.

I'm using sway on top of fedora. I heard positive things with i3, but I wanted to try something that was native wayland.

I use i3, but to say that I like it is a bit overstated. It's fine, does what I expect the very basic of a tiling window manager to do. I used Nimdow for a while and it's pretty good, the default bar is way better than i3 (supports ANSI colour coding, mouse presses, etc.), but I could never quite get to grips with the tiling algorithm.

I'm working on my own WM though, it's not tiling per-se, I choose to call in non-overlapping and I'm trying to solve my gripes with i3. Basically windows should not be forcefully expanded if they don't want to. Try open galculator under i3 and watch the horror. And when expanded the size should be split based on their initial sizes. So if I have Firefox open and want to do something in a quick terminal window the terminal won't get 1/2 of the screen. Firefox wanted more space than the terminal initially, so the terminal gets to take up a smaller share of the space.

i3 just works in my opinion, and I can change stuff how I like it. It's simple and has loads of users, so guides are easy to come by.

I'm using sway because it feels a lot like i3 but for wayland, and I used i3 for years. Got that configuration just right.

Currently using sway, but mostly for the lack of good Auto tilers on Wayland

Had the same problem, would like a middle ground between sway and Hyprland. Give me the option to be like Hyprland and some features and fancynes it has, but don't force me.