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.

The main thing I’m missing right now is per-tag default layouts, but you can work around that by issuing a heap of commands at startup(before any views are created to prevent flicker).

Other candidates

dwl is close to perfect as a dwm replacement, but there a few rough edges that need ironing out. I’d recommend it to others who want a dwm experience.

sway is popular with lots of support, but fails on every count for me. Its workspace implementation is ferociously under-featured. Its layout splitting feels like a chore. Custom layouts require endless scripting after making everything float. Even seemingly simple things like window switching across branches tends toward drudgery requiring heaps of code, you’ll even need to implement locking to make sure keys aren’t swallowed if you execute commands quickly.

wayfire is very visually attractive and offers some basic tiling support. If you’re comfortable with sway then it is probably an excellent choice for a more visually appealing desktop. I do plan to keep an eye on it to see whether tiling extension becomes more featureful.

vivarium feels very promising. It features most of the layouts I’ve become accustomed to, but its stability wasn’t great for me.

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 sandbar.

wob (replacing dzen2)

wob is simple little progress bar tool, that can replace a fair chunk of my dzen2 usage. It isn’t featureful enough by design to be a full replacement, but it remains to be seen how much I’ll miss the hover popups or context hints that come with accompanying text.