I’ve used ion, ratpoison, i3, sawfish, and other tiling window managers for fifteen or more years, all totaled up. There is a great deal of pressure to use a modern desktop environment and it’s a lot of work maintaining my janky bespoke desktop environment functions necessary for a few critical applications. I use KDE’s tiling features and keyboard shortcuts, but it’s a double edged sword because I have to disable all window manager bindings in (for example) Blender and emacs to avoid shadowing important features. Actually, I have re-implemented a lot of my custom KDE shortcuts as emacs bindings as well, so they still work when emacs has the focus. Here’s one:
(cl-flet ((switch-to (name)
(lambda ()
(interactive)
(shell-command (concat "wmctrl -a " name)))))
(global-set-key (kbd "s-1") (switch-to "librewolf"))
(global-set-key (kbd "s-2") (switch-to "konsole"))
(global-set-key (kbd "s-3") (switch-to "signal"))
(global-set-key (kbd "s-4") (switch-to "darktable"))
(global-set-key (kbd "s-5") (switch-to "emacs")))
For my wm+Emacs work, I unified the shortcuts by calling a separate go bin that checks if the active window is Emacs or not. If it is, it sends the command to the Emacs Daemon. If it’s not it sends the command to i3. For directional commands like move focus, first check it there’s an Emacs window to that side, if not send the command to i3.
