 I've been asked for a while now to take a look at tiling on KD plasma And I've been a little resistant to doing so simply because the scripts that existed before Really weren't all that good. I tried Cronkite and while it worked You could tell that it was kind of forcing itself on k-win and it was just kind of buggy now I know that it was better than the scripts that had come before it and it really wasn't that bad But it still was something that I just wasn't all that positive Now one of the things that I always have a problem with when it comes to this sort of thing is that I'm a tiling window manager guy I use actual tiling window managers like i3 and dwm and things that are actually meant to be tiling window managers And I find myself to be a little bit of a snob when it comes to things that imitate them So when I tried pop shell A few months ago. I wasn't all that impressed because it's not all that customizable Like you have a bunch of hard-coded key bindings in that scenario and you can't change them They're just there and you have to kind of deal with it. So i'm always a little bit resistant towards Making something that is not a tiling window manager a tiling window manager and then imposing Rules on it that are kind of meant for things that aren't tiling window managers So I've been a little bit resistant towards actually Doing a video on a tiling window manager inside of plasma Is just two things that don't really go together for me But then I was told about a script called bismuth and bismuth is a Script, I think it's a k-win script that will allow you to make kd plasma into a tiling window manager And it does so in a way that is not offensive to me all that much and it's actually pretty good So that's what we're going to take a look at today. Let's go ahead and jump right in Now the first thing you should know is that as far as i'm aware you can't actually install this From the k-win add scripts manager thing So if you go to window management and go to k-win scripts and hit this new this get new scripts thing And you search for bismuth you're not going to find it as far as i'm aware Yeah, it's not there. So you you have to install this in some other way It's in a lot of repos. I installed it from the aur You can also build it from source if you want to build it from source I would Much prefer that it was part of this Get new scripts thing because it'd be easier for most people to install But the developers have chosen not to do that now. It's also possible that it's not actually a k-win script And it just wouldn't fit in there. So I I don't actually know I just know that this is how you install it You do you open up a terminal do paru and then bismuth And it will search for it And you'll see that it's actually in the eight arco linux repositories and in the aur I installed dark a linux one They turns out they're exactly the same the point is is that's how you would go about installing it He's usually from a repo now once you've installed it Close out of settings because it won't appear until you close it out and open it back up if you have it open You'll find a new section here called window tiling and you'll have to enable tiling with this button here And then apply and all your windows then will be tiled So if you open up a new window you'd get more windows like this now One thing that i've changed is that by default when you have two or more windows You'll actually get a title bar. I didn't want that So if you go to appearance here, you can actually turn that off, which I find really cool That's something that as far as I know cronkite wasn't able to offer now It's possible that it was added in later on in cronkite and I just don't know about it But when I use it that possibility wasn't there you had to do the traditional way of removing the borders outside of the tiling aspect of it now We'll come back to the gaps here in just a minute, but the rest of the settings here are actually fairly Intuitive you can obviously enable or disable window tiling you can change Layout so there's it comes with several different layouts the tile layout the monocle layout three column, which would be Three windows side by side and then they tile like that you had the spiral layout layout Which we call the Fibonacci layout the spread layout, which i'm not actually sure what that is and the sterile layout Which I also don't know what that is you can also choose to have separate layouts for each activity or virtual desktop And then you can control how your windows react to the tiling aspect of Bismuth so you can have it so it maximizes the sole sole window Which means that you have no gaps along the outside and it's full screen You can choose so that the floating window is always on top, which is good for Dialogs and stuff like that you can also choose where new windows spawn So this is something that you'd have to patch into like dwm if you wanted to spawn into a different place You can either have it set for so it comes at the end of the stack Or at the beginning of the stack and then there are a whole bunch of rules So you can restrict the window width you can prevent the window from Minimizing you can prevent the window from protruding from its screen And you can also disable tiling for certain applications Whether it be on activities, which nobody uses activities or on certain screens Now interestingly it says screens here and not workspaces. You notice that so I don't know whether or not this applies to actual like monitors like screens like monitors or if it means Workspaces, I'm not sure how that actually works. The point is is that those rules are available Now you can also change rules for specific windows To ignore for tiling to ignore windows. In other words, it would it would basically float just like normal Or you can force things to float with these rules here The other thing that it does is allows you to set gaps So if you open up another window here, you'll you actually won't see that here So if we go to another We close settings here and open up two terminals You'll see that there are actual gaps now The reason why I didn't work with settings is because settings requires itself to be a certain size And it won't go any smaller Now there is a workaround for that that you can find that on the bismuth github It will help you to make it so that that's not as big of a deal But I haven't done that yet. So the point is is that when you do have Windows that can open up to whatever size You can have gaps and I've set many gaps to five and it looks really nice I have to say now the one thing that you will have noticed in this tiling settings panel here Is that there's no place for key bindings And that's because key bindings are being left to plasma itself to manage So if you actually search for shortcuts, you'll get this panel here And you can then type in kegwin and you'll get a whole bunch of options For managing your windows So this means moving your windows with your keyboard like you would do in a tiling window manager This is miles and away better than pop shell because pop shell doesn't give you any customization at all In terms of keyboard shortcuts for everything like all there has some Things that you can customize not all of them like some of them are hard quoted in this you can change everything Like you can change how to move the windows from one side to the other one screen to the other one workspace to another You can change keyboard shortcuts to have them Go from floating to not floating the sky is the limit in terms of what you want to customize your keyboard shortcuts for now Obviously, this can be severely overwhelming if you're not used to managing your shortcuts But frankly, it's not that big of a deal for anybody who's used a tiling window manager before This is a piece of cake for me personally I haven't gone through and changed hardly any of them except for the ones to change workspaces and move Clients from one screen to another that's basically the ones that I've added Now the one thing that you'll see is if we open up a browser here and go to their github page You'll actually see a section down here at the bottom called tweak section And that gives you some tips on making it so that bismuth and kwin play better with multiple monitors So you can enable a couple of extra keyboard shortcuts You can also enable the multi-screen behavior And one of the things that I went and did was enable the Focus follows mouse option, which means that every time I the mouse goes over A screen it activates that way it works similar to what you'd see in a tiling window manager Whereas if you do end up using your mouse, you can activate a a client by hovering over it Instead of having to click on it, which is the normal kkd default because a lot of times I was finding myself going to another screen Starting to type because the mouse was over there and realized that that window wasn't actually in focus Because i'm so used to when the mouse is hovering over something usually that means that windows in focus That's not actually the case in default plasma. It's something you have to change So that's definitely something that I highly recommend you do If you're going to stick with the tiling and you are used to it If you're used to using Plasma as it is maybe the clicking doesn't bother you for someone coming from a tiling window manager I would go this way now when you do have multiple windows open I have found that it's been very responsive One of the things that I had a problem with with with cronkite is that when you spawned a new window Sometimes it would have the window pop up like a floating window and then snap into the position Into the the stack and I had the same problem with the pop shell on popos Is that you could really tell that it wasn't meant to be a tiling window manager? and it Some kind of sometimes bugged out. I've not had that problem with bismuth at all It's been very responsive and you can open up as many windows as you want and you can tell That it just works like sometimes when you with even Dedicated tiling window managers you open up multiple windows. It can get sluggish I haven't had any problems with that whatsoever On bismuth within kd plasma, which is nice There are also several different dedicated window tiling shortcuts that you can change so you can change Two different layouts using these settings right here. Now, some of them aren't assigned to anything, but you can For example do meta m and it would change to the monocle that which means every single new window you open will be full screen You can change to the previous layouts and stuff like that using the meta and the pipe symbol and the Backslash, so that's going to be meta Backslash will change to the three column layout which looks like this And you just remember that the settings does not like to be Scrunched down that much so we'll close that so that's the three columns layout And then if you do super shift and then backslash or in this case pipe It changes to the monocle layout and then do it again. This is the tile layout and then the spiral layout which looks like this So that's basically the fabonacci layout we'll close that And then we'll go back again, and this is the stair layout. This is what that looks like You can see it's kind of uh, that's a really weird layout. It's like It's kind of like monocle, but the windows keep getting smaller that I don't I don't know why that would be useful at all, but apparently someone likes that layout will close a bunch of those That's a weird layout. We'll do this again. This is the spread layout Which is kind of the same you can see the windows are kind of progressively moving to the left I'm trying to make this easier to see Yeah, that's a little weird, right? I don't again. I'm not sure why that this Layout would be useful because you can't actually how would you go about using any of these other windows? Like that seems like a waste of screen real estate But whatever footage, but if you wanted to use that you could use it really easily now We'll do another one. This is the three column and then we saw there all the rest of them So those are the layouts And you can change those keyboard shortcuts just like you can change any other cheap keyboard shortcuts So if you wanted to change this one, you just hit add custom shortcut Put in the shortcut that you want to use hit apply and that would change the shortcut Now that is bismuth for plasma kitty. I have to admit that this is actually very impressive now. I Don't think that it's going to get me away from tiling window managers. There's still a Mile above in terms of customization in a tiling window manager that you're not going to get here so things like Doing a different bar. I mean you could technically do a different bar here if you wanted to I suppose Now that I think about it. But the point is is that There's a different feeling at least to configuring a tiling window manager in a config file Then there is configuring like this and maybe that's just me And I'm like I said at the beginning a snob when it comes to Tiling window managers, but I don't think that this is going to get me away from a tiling window manager But I will say that if you are a plasma user and you want to kind of see what what tiling is all about This is a great entry way Like give this a try if you like this then maybe a tiling window manager would be something that you'd be interested in trying out later on And because it's kind of like a halfway point because you get all the benefits of plasma here You got all the the customization you got the panels You got the settings all that stuff here already because it's just plasma But you get the some of the benefits at least of a tiling window manager So it kind of give you a taste of it So to make to maybe give you an idea of whether or not it would be for you or not So that's really cool And I can also see for people who don't want to leave plasma at all and know they don't want to leave plasma Maybe they're not interested in Doing all their configuration in a configuration file going this route We'll give them the benefits of a tiling window manager without leaving the the comforts of plasma behind So that's really cool And I have to say that I'm also very impressed with how stable it is now I've been having some problems with kaywin every time my Screen goes asleep. It forgets which monitor is which monitor So sometimes my panel's on this one sometimes my panel's on that one And for whatever reason The wallpaper just goes away like when I When I wake my monitors back up the the wallpapers are gone. Now this has nothing to do with bismuth I should just point that out. That's just something that I'm experiencing Because of plasma don't know what's going on there. It doesn't really matter. I'm just going to go back to i3 Anyways, so it's not that big of a deal Anyways, that's it for this video if you have comments on this You can leave those comments in the comment section below If you'd like to follow me on twitter You can do so at the linuxcast on twitter You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast before I go I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons Robert Sid Devon patrick fregg kramer maiglin jesson Thank you to steve separate linux garrick samuel mitchell ursinger j-dog harbernated jamie shon odin martin Andy ross merit camp dr. Lee peter a crucible dark benefit prime six p.m. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time