I found that Wayland had a serious lack of what I liked, which is manual tiling. Sure there is Cagebreak but it doesn’t support layer shell so no panels, notifications, or even wallpaper. Forked from Cagebreak and inspired by both Cagebreak and Herbstluftwm I wanted to have a frame based manual tiler WITH layer shell, xwayland, relative pointer and pointer constraint support thus NEDM.
It’s by no means in a daily driver state. heres a video of it in action: http://andmc.ca/mov/nedm.mp4
available here:
so with NEDM I can tell it specifically where I want my windows to open. Sway is generally automatic. say you want to open 3 terminals with a keybind sway is going to open them in the logical order it feels they should be opened. NEDM doesnt’ do that. you tell it specifically WHERE on your screen you want these terminals opened via keystrokes.
so like in nvim if you have a treesitter you can navigate between your main workspace and the tree by hitting like space w h right? you do the same thing with NEDM to navigate windows. alt+space h j k l whatever. I can split my terminals horizontally with s or vertically with S. I can also split “empty spaces” or frames in the same way WITHOUT having anything open in them. so for example I can split my browser vertically and then in the empty space go ahead and split that up so I can open stuff in there as needed when I need it without having to open something, like a terminal, in order to split it up.
Sway is great if I want to let Sway decide how to manage my windows. I want complete 100% control though so I built this.
Excellent breakdown, and I legit apologize for being such neanderthal lol I guess I have stuck beholden to my automatic tiling ways for so long I’ve been basically blinded to the potential advantages that now seem beyond obvious
Full respect for the control imperative–you and your work are refreshing and inspiring
hey no need to apologize at all!
Also keep in mind this thing is VERY specific to my personal workflow so I don’t expect it to be anyones daily driver if it ever gets to that point. for the majority of people something like Sway works fine. For me I like the clicky clacky of keyboards and NEDM gives me that.