Best Linux tiling window managers for 2023…
I’ve been trying every kind of window manager, and tiling window managers have always been the best tweakable ones. Let’s dig deeper into this article and see how it helps you and which one is the best for you.
Types Of Tiling Window Managers
Manual Tiling Window Managers
These are made to be kind of inefficient, but this is completely subjective. It offers you fewer tools and customization compared to the others and gives them less power to avoid confusion, but at the same time taking away efficiency.
You cannot resize the windows to an extent that is possible in the other types. You also have to choose where a new window is gonna tile which is… as I said, inefficient.
i3 — This is simply the best window manager for beginners who want to get into wm. It comes with every basic program like panel, menu, etc, and is very easy to learn the keybinding. It uses a custom syntax of i3, which is very easy to understand and learn. Yes, it is a manual tiler, but it just reduces all your work.
Sway — This… is exactly i3, along with all the customization, tweaks, etc. The only difference you get here is that it is made for Wayland rendering support. I’m not gonna go in-depth with this, but just know i3 uses Xorg, and it’s probably the most popular, but IF you use Wayland for some reason, you have the option.
These 2 are generally the only ones I would recommend to you if you are a new user or you just wish to have a manual tiling wm. You can literally do everything in this which the other manual wm might/might not offer.
Dynamic Tiling Window Manager
This type of window manager allows you to be… a bit freer when it comes to customizations. You could manually set how the windows would tile using a “layout system” and the wm would do the rest.
Compared to Manual Tilers, dynamic tiling wm is made to take care of the tiling mess. Although this is not recommended to new users, you could program these kinds of wm to anything.
DWM — As the name suggests, it stands for Dynamic Window Manager, and does simply what it says. it gives you a dynamic way to arrange/tile windows according your custom layout. It does come with it’s own panel and is simple by looks. It uses C for configuration, and needs to be recompiled after tweaking it before you use it, which is it’s downside.
AwesomeWM — This wm is… awesome. It is toofeature-richh to use for a beginner, but it’s just butter when it comes to the number of changes you could do with it. Unlike other wm, this one gives you everything from right-clicking many, to running the script, to a super customizable panel, to everything else you expect. It’s also a very popular one, so you could install a custom wm which others have done for you and it’s just great. This wm uses Lua as its basic language and configuration, although is a bit more advance to tweak yourself.
Hybrid Tiling Window Manager
But both of the above types give you limited features and effort, to not make it overwhelming, but there does exist the final type of wm, which is more advance and takes efficiency to the next level… ie… If you know what you are doing.
This allows you to not only create custom layouts, and use them as you wish, but also switch to a manual mode and do everything yourself. There are not a lot of examples of this type, but there are some very popular ones.
BSPWM — This, as explained is a hybrid tiling wm, and allows you to do everything which HTWM could do. The reason I say this is for advaadvancedrs is that it does not come with anything including a panel, keyboard shortcut customizer, menu, run script, etc. YO have to install, set up, and, configure all of that. It uses the basic C language for the configuration of the program, and it’s more difficult to install when compared to i3 and so on.
HLWM — This is a less popular window manager and is almost exactly BSPWM when it comes to the features is as advanced as this… except for one part. Instead of using mainline C, this wm uses a separate “hlwm config file” which is easier to use, learn and configure.
Honorable mentions
- Wormwm
- Xmonad
- Qtile
- Berrywm, etc
That being said, I’ll be making more such videos on YouTube. If you feel like contributing to me, feel free to do so at Patreon and follow my socials for more content. I’ll catch you asap.
You’re awesome ☺
FadinGeek
