Trying Out PaperWM

I’m an enthusiast of playing around with different window management schemes. I like the idea of a tiling window manager, but I’m not smart enough to ever get really productive in something like i3 or sway.

for the past few years I’ve been using Rectangle on MacOS as something of a band-aid

I’ve been using the Tiling WM Extension ion Gnome for a while, and I’ve been pretty happy with it. It does a good job of emulating one of the better features on Win11, a progressive way to arrange windows in an ordered way.

Now I’m trying out PaperWM. The concept simplifies and streamlines windows from occupying a fully two dimensional space into something resembling 1.5 dimensions: windows are all arranged side-by-side infinitely, and you just traverse along the line of windows to find what you’re looking for.

I’ve been using it full time for a week and I’m pretty happy with it. Maybe this will stick for a while.

Update 2024-11-22: PaperWM hard crashes when I launch games that try to switch to fullscreen from Steam. Back to the drawing board!

Update 2025-03-12: Here’s a fun blog post about Niri, another window manager inspired by Gnome Paper. I might try that next, though I’d have to get swaybar and friends up and running so it may be a test of patience.