alt Hacker NewsI settled on river¹ after a couple of decades with awesomewm. Tiling and tagging work in a way you'd expect coming from awesomewm, but nothing else does. I made my mind up because having to use workspaces and manual tiling is a far harder sell than implementing the functionality I want on top of a decent base.
If anything it reminds me more of the experience with using awesome v2(before lua); you generate a config file for the base WM, and then build up external tooling to drive it how you see fit. The experience has been quite pleasant, but I do enjoy twiddling.
¹ https://codeberg.org/river/river
Edit: I just checked my dotfiles. Awesome went in on 2008-06-09, and river on 2024-06-30. Happy and largely uneventful two years on river.
I had seen river but for some reason didn't look too much into it. I think it's because at first glance it looks like a protocol that you can build a WM on, rather than a WM itself, but I guess it's probably easy to build your own tooling over it (a lot easier than "building your own WM" in the traditional sense)?
I'll give it a look - thanks!