I need extremely small tiling windows, say something with only a width/height of 10px. However, by experimentation I found that my window manager Sway (and likely also i3) has a hard-coded minimum height of 60px and minimum width of 100px.

So, dear Linux gurus, do you know of a window manager with configurable minimum tiling window size? Or with no minimum at all? Bonus point for running natively on Wayland.

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    1 year ago

    I haven’t tried creating tiny windows, but I would imagine that it would be pretty easy for you to just install compositors on Wayland or window managers on Xorg and test it yourself.

    But, bigger question – I’m kind of curious why you’re dead-set on a bunch of tiny tiled windows to the extent of being willing to disregard other functionality of the window manager or even the windowing system. Like, what is your use case? Is this some kind of automated testing system?

      • tal@lemmy.today
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        1 year ago

        For the burn-in part, I don’t know about Wayland, but with X11, I’m pretty sure that you can use RANDR – see the xrandr command – to entirely slice part of the screen away. Like, you don’t need to put dummy windows there or whatever, and that’ll work with any WM.

        • sebastiancarlos@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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          1 year ago

          Cool, thanks! Look like there are things like xrandr for Wayland with this functionality. the burn-in is not so bad right now but I’ll keep this in mind.

  • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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    1 year ago

    I’ve ended up with windows of zero height in the past, due to some kind of obscure bug involving nvidia and unity games running in windowed mode, so I suspect the WM that comes with my DE has no minimum. It isn’t tiling or Wayland-friendly, though, so no good for your use case.

    (And add me to the list of people curious about what you intend to use this for.)

  • YIj54yALOJxEsY20eU@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Using i3 and some custom auto tiling (split the window on whichever axis is greater) I can create such small windows that they can no longer be seen, though function correctly. You may also consider something like tmux. I am curious to know what your application is.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      1 year ago

      I can get tiled windows that are definitely narrower than what OP has specified on a default sway config. Just randomly threw up a bunch of windows, went down to 27 pixel wide windows. Didn’t try narrower or try splitting vertically, but that does make me wonder whether the limitation he’s hitting might be the particular application requesting a minimum window size, not the compositor. It looks like the X11 API does permit for that:

      https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76001204/how-do-you-set-a-minimum-window-size-in-x11

      I wouldn’t be surprised, though I haven’t looked, if a given compositor or window manager would have the ability to override that.

  • zolax@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    I think dwm can be compiled (and is very minimal so quick to compile) with different minimum widths and heights.

    there’s also dwl, which is supposed to be dwm but native Wayland rather than X, but I haven’t tried it out