I tried GlazeWM and it does what it says “technically” but there’s a lot of edge cases where it doesn’t and things just glitch out or don’t tile. Applications that don’t work well where you have to edit the configs per app etc. I settled on using Komorebi [1] instead and it’s a lot more of “just works”, just run it and go.
I'm glad to hear you are having a good experience with komorebi! The komorebi status bar[1] will be shipping with the next release of komorebi, along with built-in theming support[2], I hope you'll enjoy these new features too.
Applications behaving badly is a big problem for any window management project on Windows because application developers, especially since the rise of Electron, are increasingly throwing established Win32 application development guidelines to the wind with reckless abandon.
Komorebi deals with this by exposing functionality for handling edge cases to the end user with a powerful set of application matchers, and pooling together all of the weird application-specific fixes into a single upstream which is loaded for all new users on first install[3] and can be easily updated by the end user[4].
This upstream is now also consumed by at least one other window management project, Whim[5].
I think a lot of existing tiling window manager users from Linux and macOS look for straight "equivalents" on Windows if they end up here, but from my point of view both as an end user of tiling window managers and a developer of a tiling window manager, this is a huge missed opportunity.
Komorebi initially took a lot of inspiration from bspwm and yabai, but as I spent more time working with different monitors (square, wide, ultrawide) in different orientations, I became more and more convinced that a layout algorithm-driven design provides for a better overall experience than painfully manually manipulating a BSP tree to do something as simple as getting 3 columns on an ultrawide. More recently I also integrated some interesting ideas from more niche WMs such as PaperWM[6].
Tiling window manager development on Windows is really at the bleeding edge of the entire field these days, where the boundaries (especially in UX) continue to be pushed unencumbered by the inertia of established heavyweights and tradition.
Within the next decade I wouldn't be surprised to see this come full circle and find people implementing "Window Manager ___ From Windows, but for Linux/macOS".
Is there any way to get similar behavior as inside IDEs like Visual Studio or Eclipse or IntelliJ? Where each tile has tabs, and I can drag tabs to another tile, or create a new tile by dragging to the left/right/up/down of an existing tile.
Or is there some reason this behavior is not useful? I see some hints that it would be. More and more apps have tabs - windows explorer now, all IDEs of course, all text editors, browsers, terminals. And often they let you drag the tabs to some other convenient place, like Firefox lets you drag tabs to another Firefox window. Would it not make sense to generalise this to the entire screen?
Komorebi has had tabbed stacks for a while, but since the overwhelming majority of users interact with the tiling window manager via their keyboards and not their mice, the only mouse interaction with tabs that has been implemented so far is click-to-focus.
If this is something that is important enough to you that you want to work on it, contributions are welcome!
(Dev for GlazeWM, coming to this thread super late!)
What apps did you find were bugging out? The default handling has been tweaked and improved a lot over the years but there's still some edge cases that are tough to handle
It's super buggy. It starts with a diagnostic terminal I have to move off to another workspace, the status bar immediately breaks and stops updating on sleep (known issue that's on the GitHub repo), basically the Rust rewrite has thus far made it a much worse experience.
The issue where a terminal popped up was fixed pretty quick - it’s in the current v3.1.1 release. I’ve got a few more stability fixes coming up in a release later today as well
Re. the status bar breaking on sleep - will have a fix for this sometime next week. Were there other issues you came across?
[1] https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi