If, like me, you have been looking to move on from i3/sway into something with a “Paper”-like experience, check out niri: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri
Paper (for GNOME shell) introduced a new tiling window manager paradigm: scrolling workspaces. New windows are placed to the right and build up in a stack. You push and pop from this stack as you enter and exit subtasks. For example, you might be editing code and want to open a PDF to find some datasheet values, then open a repl to do some calculations, then close both those windows and put the result into your code. The new windows grow out to the right, then you close them to scroll back left to the code.
While tools like papersway managed to hack a paper like experience on top of sway, niri implements it from the ground up into a window manager that is as light as sway but designed with scrolling workspaces as a first class citizen. For example, it has an overview mode for zooming out and seeing many workspaces at once. Given that the raison d’etre of the paper/scrolling paradigm is to be able to handle large numbers of windows, once you’ve used niri+overview it is very hard to go back to sway and live without it.
It is very nice! It’s also not really an improvement if you live in two windows all day long (80% if my time all I have open is a browser and my code) but as soon as you start having to context switch in and out of other tasks on multiple tracks (mortgage application, CAD design, proposal doc editing, email follow-ups, procrastinating on HN!) having paper like scrolling stacks is a huge boon.
There is also scroll (sway fork) and plugins for hyprland. Scrolling experience was not actually better in niri vs. others in my experience just because it was built around it. I tried to use niri, but there is too much missing functionality I want compared to hyprland and also worse power consumption.
Paper (for GNOME shell) introduced a new tiling window manager paradigm: scrolling workspaces. New windows are placed to the right and build up in a stack. You push and pop from this stack as you enter and exit subtasks. For example, you might be editing code and want to open a PDF to find some datasheet values, then open a repl to do some calculations, then close both those windows and put the result into your code. The new windows grow out to the right, then you close them to scroll back left to the code.
While tools like papersway managed to hack a paper like experience on top of sway, niri implements it from the ground up into a window manager that is as light as sway but designed with scrolling workspaces as a first class citizen. For example, it has an overview mode for zooming out and seeing many workspaces at once. Given that the raison d’etre of the paper/scrolling paradigm is to be able to handle large numbers of windows, once you’ve used niri+overview it is very hard to go back to sway and live without it.
It is very nice! It’s also not really an improvement if you live in two windows all day long (80% if my time all I have open is a browser and my code) but as soon as you start having to context switch in and out of other tasks on multiple tracks (mortgage application, CAD design, proposal doc editing, email follow-ups, procrastinating on HN!) having paper like scrolling stacks is a huge boon.