PaperWM: tiled window management for GNOME

When I started using Linux on my personal computer, one of the first things I got excited about was tiny lightweight window managers, largely because my laptop at the time had 32MB of RAM and anything else was unusable.

Then I got into tiling window managers like xmonad! I could manage my windows with my keyboard! They were so fast! I could configure xmonad by writing a Haskell program! I could customize everything in all kinds of fun ways (like using dmenu as a launcher)! I used 3 or 4 different tiling window managers over the years and it was fun.

About 6 years ago I decided configuring my tiling window manager wasn’t fun for me anymore and switched to using the Ubuntu stock desktop environment: Gnome. (which is much faster now that I have 500x more RAM in my laptop :) )

So I’ve been using Gnome for a long time, but I still kind of missed tiling window managers. Then 6 months ago a friend told me about PaperWM, which lets you tile your windows in Gnome! I installed it immediately and I’ve been using it ever since.

PaperWM: tiling window management for Gnome

The basic idea of PaperWM is: you want to keep using Gnome (because all kinds of things Just Work in Gnome) but you also kinda wish you were using a tiling window manager.

It’s a Gnome extension (instead of being a standalone window manager) and it’s in Javascript.

“Paper” means all of your windows are in a line

The main idea in PaperWM is it puts all your windows in a line, which is actually quite different from traditional tiling window managers where you can tile your windows any way you want. Here’s a gif of me moving between / resizing some windows while writing this blog post (there’s a browser and two terminal windows):

PaperWM’s Github README links to this video: http://10gui.com/video/, which describes a similar system as a “linear window manager”.

I’d never heard of this way of organizing windows before but I like the simplicity of it – if I’m looking for a specific window I just move left/right until I find it.

everything I do in PaperWM

there are lots of other features but these are the only ones I use:

• move left and right between windows (Super + ,, Super + .)
• move the window left/right in the ordering (Super+Shift+,, Super+Shift+.)
• full screen a window (Super + f)
• make a window smaller (Super + r)

I like tools that I don’t have to configure

I’ve been using PaperWM for 6 months on a laptop and I really like it! I also really appreciate that even though it’s configurable (by writing a Javascript configuration file), it does the things I want out of the box without me having to research how to configure it.

The fish shell is another delightful tool like that – I basically don’t configure fish at all (except to set environment variables etc) and I really like the default feature set.