this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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I've been suggested to use a tiling window manager like Sway since it allows for controlling windows with hotkeys, but I'm having trouble getting started. I installed it in Fedora and tried logging back in with SwayFX (since it has features like blurring) but after I'm just shown a wallpaper with a top bar, the top left shows a 1 and the top right shows the time. I don't know what to do there. I tried looking up guides but didn't find anything, can you link me some if you know of any?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 23 hours ago

I think this wiki cheetsheet will explain some of the defaults. Pretty much everything is controlled with a keybind using the meta/super (windows) key. Mod + d should open the launcher, I only used dmenu but yours might be something else. The launcher will let you launch applications by name. If you just want a terminal, Mod + Enter will open one.

You will want to look at your config. It should live in ~/.config/sway/config. If it's not there then mkdir ~/.config/sway/ && cp /etc/sway/config ~/.config/sway/. That should list the keybinds you have set. You can look up the options in the man page for sway.

Once you can do some basic window control, you might want to customise the status bar. The config should tell you what bar is being used, but there are a huge array of statusbars to choose from - I used i3status-rust but try searching for i3/sway statusbars to see what's out there.