MangoWCurious

So since I got back on the window manager game I’ve been on Hyprland as it was super easy to install, works pretty much right out of the box, and the pain points of how to get some system things like Wifi and brightness control working are something which I’ve become familiar with.

Wayland having a compositor as part of the way it works is sweet because things like blur and animations (gol don’t like these but they’re a good example) work as defined in the Hyprland configuration files as opposed to a separate program running to render those things in X Server.

That all being said, the fact that Hyprland is so easy to configure is in part due to it being a bit set in it’s ways. Like i3 before it, these manual tiling window managers sorta anger me. Probably because I learned initially with AwesomeWM which is tag and layout based and then moved to Xmonad where I was editing source code to essentially mimic what I had gotten used to with AwesomeWM.

MangoWC

I’m not sure what is different now a days. Maybe its just that there are a lot more people in the space so these sorts of projects are more common. Back in the day there were like 2 or 3 main window managers competing with each other, all with different functionality so there was a reason to pick one or another. There weren’t new options out there that often that weren’t essoteric one off builds. Now it seems there are a lot of new things out all the time. I’m not complaining! Just sayin’ its a lot different than it was!

MangoWC seems to me to be more like the window managers I was used to in the past but is a Wayland compositor. Because of this I’ve been curious about trying it but my Hyprland setup is functional enough and clear enough to me as far as understanding it that I didn’t care to give configuring something new from scratch a go.

What Do I Miss?

Ah yes the days of Xmonad I think were my finest hours of desktop window management in a way I wanted and also understood. I found that I liked the defined layouts more than the manual mode of arranging windows. It allows for a few cool things like the column layout but with just one window you can have it centered and take up most the screen with a bit of space on the sides.

Hyprland had a lot of options lets say, but really you’re defining things like, when there is a single window add space to the side, and so on which isn’t as dynamic as having a fixed pane which the window is forced to abide by and then the alterations are on the pane itself.

DWM was also always lurking in the background as the most customizable window manager out there. I’m not sure if that’s actually true, Xmonad was also a source code edited window manager but maybe there were just less people making patches out there and I’m not smart enough to make my own features in either C or Haskell so it wouldn’t matter. But a cool patch on DWM was the ability to be on a workspace or tag and then take a single window from another and toss it in the window stack for a second and then throw it back. Hyprland has no way to go about implementing something like that. As I understand it, MangoWC does….

Scrolling

The idea of a scrolling window manager I think was discussed or even maybe implemented in some home brew project back in the day at some point but I think there were some X Server limitations which made it a bit silly and the idea never really caught on. Niri, a Wayland manager which came out a bit after Hyprland as I understand it is based entirely around this idea and this time, right time right place, the idea has taken off! Niri is up there with Hyprland far ahead of any other window manager as far as active users.

I like the idea, in practice I’m not too sure. The whole thing with tiling windows and workspaces is you can have a bunch of perfectly arranged windows that make it easy to see as many things at once in a way that makes sense. Scrolling through windows means the third and fourth one are out of view. Conceptially they’re over there and I get that scrolling over makes that easy to understand, but if you’re already used to workspaces I mean…. what’s not to get? You’re just loosing the availbility of seeing the windows together on one screen. If you don’t want them to share the screen just put them on a different workspace and make a scroll like animation for when you switch between them.

That all being said I haven’t used this feature much at all so the fact that with MangoWC scrolling is just another layout much like the Master and Stack or the Center Column layout, I think it makes a compelling reason to give it a whirl.

Animations??

Ah how I hate animations on window managers. Yes it’s cool you can throw them in there and it looks siq when you’re making a 45 second rice show off video, I think it makes things feel slow and usually they bog down the system.

In 99% of cases I just disable them right out of the get go, now that with Wayland they work out of the box. Beforehand I’d’ve just skipped any steps that involved enabling them. But why I bring them up now is their ability to help with the so many fancy and special layouts and editing them.

I’ve found that the animations here in MangoWC are actually helpful and add a point of functionality. The fact there are now so many fancy layouts that hid windows or nest them together and the like, the animations are super helpful as when you make changes to the layout you get a half second glimpse into the window moving and you therefore know where things are going.

I don’t think I’m going to keep them on forever. I hope to find a way to disable most of these random layouts and just keep the ones I like. But in the mean time, whilst playing around with how things are working, the animations are actually helping as they show where things are going and therefore how MangoWC is thinking when I push the random combination of key combos.

Points of Stoke

Here are a few things in my initial tinkerings which are standing out as reasons I think I might stick with this over Hyprland

• hot reload with super+shift+r when managing the configuration with home-manager
• The layouts are far more explicit. This comes from Hyprland being more manual. I think I just gravitate towards these layout and tag focused programs.
• It’s integrated into my home.nix file. After switching to flakes after so many years of sort of avoiding it just because, I now understand nix-a-fying everything. The fact this is setup to be a module imported into my flakes setup is pretty cool at the time of me embracing this as much as possible. That being said I’m essentially defining this all in a file in their MangoWC syntax. I don’t have it setup to use Nix syntax to define anything. Maybe I should change that…
• I don’t like the default cursors and backgrounds built into Hyprland which can be disabled but still seem to show up every once and a while