I have a laptop with an 11 inch screen and 768p display. Naturally, my usage breakdown is:
- 80% one window in fullscreen
- 15% two windows side by side
- 5% other
I’ve considered tiling window managers. I used i3wm on this in the past. It was a little complicated and I customized the bottom bar to show commands for dummies.
alt-Enter: term | alt-D: launch | alt-F: fullsc | alt-1: new workspace | alt-shift-1: move to workspace
That plus some battery, wifi, time info. I never got ‘good’ with i3 and would consult the cheat sheet regularly.
Is there a paradigm (tiling or otherwise) that would let me quickly and simply launch programs with the keyboard (like most distros these days) and switch between fullscreen windows? and set them side by side as needed?
My usage is keyboard-first but mouse-available. i3 didn’t seem tailored to mouse usage the way some other tiling wms are. and sometimes you’d launch a program like the wifi settings window and it wasn’t built to be resized for a twm, so it looked weird. (no floating window support.)
They key is repetition, and this means it can be easier to go “all in” and learn, say, only six or eight keyboard chords from stumpwm than to use Xfce with mouse and i3 and more stuff, because the latter is ultimately more complex and requires more things that need to be memorized.
There is a learning program called Anki which is great for repeating learned stuff, it was made for language learning but I’ve used it also for a job where I had to learn like one hundred three-letter acronyms. It can be very helpful but it won’t help if one does not use the learned stuff.