this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2024
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Yeah, it's basically a tiling window manager that lets you expand each workspace horizontally and scroll left and right through it. The value for me is that I often want each window in a workspace to be a certain size. For example, my browser is fullscreen, and my password manager is half a screen off to one side. My terminals are usually half a screen, sometimes stacked if they're just for monitoring or something, and my IDE is fullscreen all the way to the right of them.
This is a lot like what I do. Where possible, my apps are TUIs, so terminals dominate. At any given point I have 4 tmux sessions with around 6 tabs in each. I haven't refined that, though, because my editor (Helix) also has window support and many editing tasks (yank/paste) are easier with Helix windows that with multiple helix sessions running in different tmux tabs. This works best with full-screen terminals, and I find myself closing tmux panels to open helix windows... I need to refine this.
A few apps are GUI. Browsers, PDF viewers, graphics editors. Those are all full-screen.
How do you use the sliding feature this way, though, and how is it better than just having separate desktops? Do you use multiple displays, or only one?
I prefer to use my WM and a lightweight terminal instead of term tabs or tmux. If another window is going to be short-lived, I won't bother, but for longer tasks I'll move to a new workspace, often opening new terminals and file managers, as needed.
I use tmux for anything I want to be long-lived. Displays, terminals, and WMs, all crash far more often than tmux. I've never once had tmux crash on me; at this point, I'm not sure that it's possible for it to crash (only half-joking).
The only times I've had tmux 'crash', I'd realized I forgot to enable linger.
When I was doing more remoting into servers, having tmux was great. These days it's all local dev, so it's far less important to me. Plus, I had gotten to a place where my tiling WM, tmux, terminal tabs, and vim tabs were all competing for keyboard shortcuts, and it was driving me crazy.
I admit, this is so bad that occasionally - and especially if I make the mistake of stopping to think about it - my brain freezes and I can't remember the chord for a few second. What helped immensely was first kmonad, then Kanata, and finally a QMK keyboard. I use exactly the same keys for navigation, create, delete, etc operations, and only vary the layer key - WM under my pinky, tmux under my index finger. Helix has it's own bindings and ways of managing windows that are different enough as to not really confuse me, and I don't use terminal tabs at all, so it's really only WM and tmux. But, yeah: a Helix split window, in a split tmux tab, in a split herbstluftwm window can occasionally get me stuck for a few second as I unbox all the layers.