Frequently Asked Question

What are tiling window managers like i3, Sway, and Hyprland?

A tiling window manager arranges every window as a non-overlapping rectangle that fills the screen, no overlapping cascades, no minimise-to-taskbar dance. Open a new window and the existing tiles shrink to make room; close one and the rest expand to fill the gap. Almost every action is keyboard-driven: Mod+Enter opens a terminal, Mod+1..9 switches workspaces, Mod+h/v changes the split direction. The result, once configured, is ruthlessly efficient on a single screen.

i3 is the classic X11 tiling manager and remains the reference. Sway is a drop-in replacement for i3 that runs natively on Wayland and reads the same configuration file. Hyprland is a more recent Wayland-only compositor with animated effects, rounded corners, and a more modern feature set. Awesome, dwm, xmonad, bspwm, and river round out the family. Tiling managers appeal especially to developers who spend their day in terminals, editors, and browsers, and never want to reach for a mouse.