I am once again considering to write my own window manager
...unless the setup I am thinking of is already possible, let me construct this in your head:
On the top of the screen, there is narrow status bar, which is split into two parts. On the right side of the bar, you have your clock, your battery, your signal strength and so on.
On the left side, there is a clickable tab for every window you have opened. It's like browser tabs: Every window always uses the entire space below the status bar.
On the far left, there could be an icon which opens a searchable list of applications, kind of like #dmenu but vertical. Everything supports mouse input as you would expect.
Does that exist? Should I make it? It would be awesome for smaller screens, like phones.
Edit: I should add that I'm planning to run it on a Nokia N900 with a single 600 MHz CPU core, 256 MB RAM and a resolution of 800×480 pixels. Existing full desktop environments like Xfce4, LXDE, and so on are way to heavy to run.
Unless you wanna write your own window manager (all the power to you!) almost any barebones window manager can pretty much be customised to meet your needs with their scripting APIs.
Oh damn, maybe you might wanna write your own for such a specific use case.
@PuppyOSAndCoffee Probably nothing for a N900 but I've heard so much of it. I really should give it a try. How does Enlightenment run with older hardware? I'm talking 8-10 years old.
notion is kinda like this, but no icons and the clock bar is at the bottom. highly scriptable in lua. it’s actually a tiling WM, but the tiling area can be just one massive thing. the tabs go on top of each tyling area, so if you have only one everything is maximized with tabs on top. i used it for a long time. customized some lua too, so its start menu thing opens on mouse click on the bar.
@MonkderZweite Well, a window manager is for managing windows, right? So, having it also provide a list of windows to click on is resonable, in my opinion.
I should've added that I'm planning to run it on a Nokia N900 with 600 MHz and 256 MB RAM, both #XFCE and #LXDE are way too heavy for it. Also, most of their menus don't fit on the 800×480 pixel screen.
I want to add an advice to the other answers. You can get a vertical menu with Rofi. Its easy to make it nice. You can config a button in the bar on any bar, I’m not sure about Gnome and KDE bars.
Almost any window manager should be able to do that. One way would be: timing WM + a script that opens each window in new workspace + bar configuration (if the built-in bar can’t do what you want, there are plenty configurable thind-party bars that most WMs support).
I did something similar: I wrote this kwin script to arrange each window maximized in a new virtual desktop, and then this plasmoid to navigate through applications by sliding the finger on the top edge.
It’s still in the first development stage, so don’t expect it to be perfect, but it work for me. You may use the kwin script and create just the “tab manager”, perhaps forked from pager, and arrange your panel as you like
This should be possible to build with sway (and presumably any other tiling wm). Now that I’m thinking about it, you can probably also do this with gnome and a couple of extensions.
The status bar can be achieved with waybar in sway, which can be easily configured the way you described. In gnome there is an extension to rearrange the top panel.
I’m thinking of opening each window in a new workspace, can be configured for sway and gnome has an extension for that.
For the tabs we can use waybar with sworkstyle for each wroskpace, requires some configuration. For gnome I’d just use one of the many task bar extensions.
I can’t immediately think of a solution for the searchable list, but I’d be surprised if it didn’t exist for both systems.
I haven't looked too deep into what's possible with the config files of i3 or awesome. Maybe I should do that first. I just assumed they would be too keyboard focused. I want everything to be visible on screen, so you don't have to remember hotkeys.
@smpl Yes, but I won't be able to remember the hotkeys after it's been sitting in a drawer for a month or two. I think basic features should be accessible via some kind of menu bar.
What you want should be quite easy to achieve with i3/sway or awesomewm. i3 has a slew of possibilities for “bars”, even the xfce/kde panels: wiki.archlinux.org/title/i3#i3bar_alternatives
Awesomewm is totally usable via the mouse and infinetly extendaple via lua.
Why would you want it floating if every window is maximized? These requirements contradict each other.
The linux community is IMHO a bit focused on tiling WMs. I like tiling as well, but in this case: the vanilla gnome workflow is kinda 70% of what you want already. The rest can be done via extensions.
@fell Sounds like XFCE4 respectively configured. The thing I am not 100% sure about is whether windows can be forced to always open fullscreen, which you seem to require.
@HaraldKi They can. Other tiling window managers do it too. There seems to be a differentiation between pop-up windows and regular windows.
I don't mind Xfce4, but my solution needs to run on very limited hardware like phones. Look at my posts about the #N900 and you'll see why I want to do this.
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