 So I've been experimenting a little bit with tolling inside KDE Plasma. So KDE Plasma has a tolling plug-in, it's an extension to K-Win, their window manager that gives it some tolling functionality, and this plug-in is called Bismuth. And I'm experimenting using a virtual machine of Kubuntu, I've been playing around in it for a few hours over the last few days or so, and I'm really happy actually using this thing. I'm not a huge fan of KDE Plasma, the desktop environment. It's not something I would go out of my way to use when we have so many fantastic window managers available on Linux. But I do really like what I'm saying out of KDE Bismuth. Let me show you how this thing works. So let me switch over to this virtual machine here and let me open a terminal. Of course, this is KDE's console with a K here, let me zoom in, I've already installed the fish shell and a lot of the things I like to install on my systems. And the first thing you want to do is you want to sudo apt install KDE-Bismuth, and that's if you're on a Debian or on a Ubuntu-based system, of course, using the apt package manager. And then once you have that installed, open your KDE settings manager. So let me go ahead and just search for settings here. And then go to window management, and then you have window tolling. And here you can change some of the default settings, honestly I was pretty okay with the standard behavior of the tolling. Now one thing that I know some people may want to change is do you want your new windows to spawn in the master area, or do you want them to spawn in the stack? Typically I like whatever window I have already as the master to always stay the master unless I change it. And that's the default behavior here in KDE Bismuth, but some people prefer their new windows to always become the master. So if you want that you would of course tick that on, but for me I'm quite happy with the defaults. And for those of you not familiar with tolling terminology like the master and stack, that is your standard layout such as this layout here. The master window is the one that's always going to take up the left hand or right hand half of the screen, but it's always going to have at least half of the screen. That's the master window and everything else gets pushed into a stack on the other column. So if I open a third terminal you see so these windows over here are the stack and of course the settings window here right now is the master. Of course you can change it. For example, there's key bindings. I can move that window wherever I want it. I can move it to the right hand side. I'm using the HJKL motion keys. I'm using SuperShift HJKL to move the windows around inside the stack, depending on what direction. So I just moved it right. If I wanted to move it up, I could do SuperShift K to move up. Although oddly enough, SuperShift K to move up the stack is actually moving it down in the stack order. So actually I would do SuperShift J to move it up. And I want to say that might have been some of the default key bindings for it. I have changed a lot of key bindings though. For example, closing windows. They're still using an old school windows kind of key binding, which I don't understand. GNOME does this too as well is a lot of desktop environments on Linux use Alt-F4 as a default key binding to close a window. Alt-F4, why use a weird function key like the F4 key? Many keyboards don't have an easy way to get to a function key anyway, especially if you're using smaller keyboards like 40% keyboards or many laptops. You have to use a special function modifier key to actually make your number keys become the function keys. Alt-F4, don't use function keys. Not for important things that you're going to use all the time. And one of the most important key bindings you'll use as a window manager user is closing your windows, right? Because every window you open has to be closed, so make it something easy to use. I use SuperShift C. That's just a standard key binding in all of my windows managers is SuperShift C. That key binding originally came, I believe, from DWM. Xmonad also uses that as far as a mod shift C to close windows. So because those two very popular window managers have always used that, I'm just kind of stuck with that particular key binding. Of course, you can modify all these key bindings to whatever it is that you've grown used to or accustomed to. I'm using SuperShift Enter to get my run launcher, which is typically D-Menu on most of my tiling window managers. But I've set it to K-Runner here because K-Runner is already built into KDE Plasma, so why not use it? Let me open the Settings Manager again. Go to Shortcuts here for all of your key bindings. And for your bismuth tiling key bindings, go to K-Win. So this is K-Win, the window manager, right? And you can see everything that has the prefix bismuth. That is some of the built-in key bindings and built-in functions that you could use with bismuth. Some of them are not set. You see several things don't have an active shortcut. You have several tiling layouts built into bismuth. If I scroll down, see if I can get to the toggle section about toggling layouts, toggle overview, that's not yet. There's so many things here. It probably would be easier for me just to search for layout. There it is. Toggle floating layout, monocle layout, quarter layout, yada, yada, yada. Now I could set each individual layout to have its own key binding, but that takes up a lot of important key bindings if you have a lot of layouts. So for me, I don't really need any particular layout set to a key binding. I just want to be able to cycle through them. So what I did is I did super tab goes one way in the layouts and super shift tab goes back the other way through the layouts, if that makes sense. So let me open some terminals again. So this again would be your standard master and stack, right? Let me open up another terminal as well. Let's get four windows and let me show you the layout. So right now this is the master and stack if I do super tab because that's what I set this to, super tab gets me to the next layout, which happens to be the monocle layout full screen. Essentially every window is full screen stacked on top of each other. And then if I do super tab again, this gets us to the three column to layout where I have this master window now is kind of the biggest column, but it's in the center and then we have two stacks, I guess, on either side of it. It's kind of a nice layout if you had a very wide screen monitor. That would probably be the layout most people on those kinds of monitors would prefer for me using a normal 1080p kind of monitor. That layout doesn't make too much sense. Then this next layout here, I didn't see what that was. Let me move to the next and move back one with super shift tab spread layout. I don't know what the spread layout is actually supposed to do. Looks like, yeah, it's got the windows a little larger, almost like 80% of the screen. But one is taking up one side of the screen, one is taking up the other side. But I had like four windows open. I guess I could cycle through them. Yeah, I could go down the stack through them. Yeah, kind of a strange layout. Super tab again gets me to the stair layout and this. Yeah, you can see all four windows here. It's basically almost like a monocle layout, but it leaves enough of a corner of a window. I guess for those of you that are clicking point users, you can actually grab one with the mouse, I guess, to bring it into focus. I'm assuming that's what that is for. And typically, though, with tiling window managers, you're not going to be using the mouse much, especially for window management stuff. Typically, your hands are going to be on the keyboard and you're going to use typically the motion keys to cycle through things. Now, let me get back to the master and stack layout, which I'm mostly comfortable with. So let me super tab a few more times. I think I overshot it. There it is. It's simply called the tile layout. They don't call it master stack. Now, some of the other settings was moving to a different workspace. Let's see if there's workspace stuff. I'm not exactly sure how they titled that here. Let me get back into K-Win. There's window to desktop one through, I don't know, one through 16. They're not set. I'm having a hard time finding what I was trying to look for, but I did set a key binding. I can tell you the key binding I was looking for, where I can move the windows from one workspace to another. I'm using, I think, super shift period to move them to the next workspace and super shift comma to move them back. So let me super shift period. Now, we've taken our settings window that had focus. It moved to the next workspace, workspace two. That's why all the terminal windows are gone. It's because they're still on workspace one, but I can take this window that has focus and do super shift comma to move it back to the previous workspace, workspace one in this case. And you can see, now I'm back there. I did notice that there's plenty of settings here in KDE Bismuth. If you're a multi-monitor user, as far as switching to a different monitor, you can send a particular window to a particular monitor, which is really important for tiling window managers. That's one thing that a lot of tiling window manager plugins that are built into like floating desktop environments, they typically lack that. And if you're a normal tiling window manager user, it almost makes it impossible to use that tiling plugin unless it has that feature because most of the time tiling window manager users, if they're multi-monitor users, they want to be able to send a window to a specific monitor and back and forth. And we just need that functionality built in. I can't show you that on camera here because I'm actually just using this virtual machine as one monitor. I didn't set it up for multi-monitors for recording purposes. But again, KDE Bismuth does have that functionality built into it. And just playing around with it for a few hours, I can tell you that if I had to use a KDE Plasma Linux distribution, I would be quite comfortable with Plasma and with Bismuth because honestly, I'm just gonna treat it like I treat pretty much every desktop environment or window manager I ever live in. I'm gonna throw this panel here at the top of the screen, right? I may have some quick launchers or whatever, but I'm typically not going to use them. I'm just gonna use a run launcher to launch everything, right? Here in this case, I'm just gonna use Krunner to launch everything. Most of the time I'm gonna live in a terminal, right? Typically I'm doing things in a terminal. Got my KDE console set up with some nice transparency. I've already got the fish shell, Vim and Neo Vim. Of course, most of the time when I'm doing some serious text editing, I'm gonna be living in Emacs anyway. So really, the desktop environment and window manager actually doesn't matter too much for somebody like me because it's mostly the programs. After I launch them, I'm gonna be in them long-term anyway, like when I launch Emacs, I'm gonna be pretty much living in Emacs for a few minutes or sometimes a few hours. So really, the window manager stuff doesn't come into play that much for me, but for those of you that are floating window manager users or full desktop environment users, you're used to using something like GNOME or KDE or XFCE and you're wanting to give tiling window management a little bit of a try. Try out KDE business because honestly, it's something, I'm really happy I took a look at it. I had somebody recommend this to me. ADT, take a look at it. I think you'll be impressed and I am. And the fact that it's such a quick installation, right? It just takes a few seconds to install this and then enable your tiling functionality. I think going forward, anytime that I need to install KDE Plasma or a KDE Plasma distribution and live in it for more than say a few minutes because it's such a quick install, yeah, I'm probably going to keep using KDE Bismuth going forward anytime I need to do anything long-term in Plasma. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Gabe James, Matt Maxim, Emmett Mitchell, Paul West. Why you both? Homie Alex, Armored Dragon, Chuck Commander, Ingrid Iokai, George Lee, Maristrom, Nader Ion, Alexander Paul, Peace, Archimvedore, Polytech, Realitease 4 Less, Red Prophet, Roland, Steven, Tools, Devler, and Willie, these guys. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at KDE Bismuth would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. These guys.