Software

river (replacing awesomewm/dwm)

river is definitely the only choice I’m comfortable with right now. The other tiling managers are either a little raw(dwl) or very weak(sway). If the setup changes it will be toward dwl or something that more closely resembles awesomewm.

What I want:

Feature	Reason
tags	Workspaces are an anaemic stub of a feature when you’re used to tags
dynamic	If I wanted to manage windows by hand I wouldn’t use a tiling manager
layouts	Some tags should be tiled in fancy patterns, some should be monocle
…	<things I depend on but haven’t noticed yet>

wideriver is a great layout engine, providing the main layouts I rely on. I may well end up changing to one of the scriptable replacements at some point though, both river-luatile and riverguile look enticing.

While per-tag default layouts are currently absent, this can be mitigated by executing commands at startup before any views are created to prevent flicker.

Other candidates

dwl is a near-perfect dwm replacement, though it still has some rough edges. I’d recommend it to others who want a dwm experience.

sway, despite its popularity and extensive user support, falls short on every count for me. Its workspace implementation is ferociously under-featured, and its layout splitting is cumbersome. Custom layouts require extensive scripting after making everything float. Even seemingly simple tasks, such as window switching across branches, become tedious, often requiring significant code. You’ll even find yourself having to implement locking mechanisms to prevent key swallowing during rapid command execution.

wayfire is visually appealing and offers basic tiling. It is a good choice for users comfortable with sway who desire a more visually engaging desktop. I do plan to keep an eye on it to see whether tiling extension becomes more featureful.

vivarium shows promise, featuring most of my accustomed layouts, but its stability has been an issue for me in testing.

foot (replacing alacritty)

foot is amazing. If I’d known it was available before it may have been the catalyst for me to move to Wayland before now. Something unimaginably amazing would have to arrive for this not to be the choice going forward.

I do miss ligatures, but not as much as I miss the clever prompt navigation or output control when using other terminals. Using a ligature supporting neovim frontend might be a reasonable compromise, as I only make significant use of ligatures in editing sessions.

sandbar (replacing built-in awesomewm/dwm functionality)

sandbar does pretty much exactly what I want from a bar. I’m going to miss how integrated the wibox is in awesomewm, but I’m comfortable enough making the widgets I really care about work with, or alongside, sandbar.

wob (replacing dzen2)

wob is a simple progress bar tool that can replace much of my dzen2 usage. By design, it is not feature-rich enough to be a complete replacement, but it remains to be seen how much I will miss the hover popups or context hints that accompany text.