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0 points_rousbound1mo ago0 comments

Thank you for your suggestions!

I will try the Alt+Tab alternative to scratchpads.

However the spatial memory concern I talked about isn't exactly of losing windows and trying to find them.

The script you mentioned seems useful to jump faster between windows you are not sure where they are. But what I tried to express is that when I'm in a workspace in i3, I have "perfect vision" of whats inside the workspace, niri I sometimes I have "tiny lapses" of having myself asking "where's the terminal, is it on the left or right of my browser?" this is not "losing the window" is just tiny frictions of having to think where a window is.

I don't know if that was a first impression that could just be solved with better attention and organization(I confess that my first try with niri was not on my work PC, but my media one that is attached to television, so I was not using niri exactly on the same mood I use i3wm).

Soon I might give niri another test drive, thanks again!

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nickjj1mo ago

No problem.

niri's alt+tab also has a filter where if you hold alt and then press "w", it will only show you things on your active workspace. There's a little label that pops up showing this. You can also press "o" to filter it for only 1 monitor (output) too.

The above might help with those lapses.

In my case I haven't experienced this because I'm usually after the end game destination which is focusing the app so fuzzy finding it is the quickest path to that. If it's 8 windows to the right or 3 to the left is all the same to me.

With that said, I do sometimes have sessions where I have 3-4 things open side by side and I quickly cycle between them by going left and right. In those cases I don't have memory lapses because there's only a few windows open and I'm doing something specific. When this task is done I usually close those windows or no longer need to remember their relative position to windows in view.

I bet you could create a cool looking horizontal mini map to show a strip of things open on a workspace, this way you don't need to open up other things (overview, alt-tab, window finder, etc.) to see where things are.