I am once again considering to write my own window manager
…unless the setup I am thinking of is already possible, let me construct this in your head:
On the top of the screen, there is narrow status bar, which is split into two parts. On the right side of the bar, you have your clock, your battery, your signal strength and so on.
On the left side, there is a clickable tab for every window you have opened. It’s like browser tabs: Every window always uses the entire space below the status bar.
On the far left, there could be an icon which opens a searchable list of applications, kind of like #dmenu but vertical. Everything supports mouse input as you would expect.
Does that exist? Should I make it? It would be awesome for smaller screens, like phones.
Edit: I should add that I’m planning to run it on a Nokia N900 with a single 600 MHz CPU core, 256 MB RAM and a resolution of 800×480 pixels. Existing full desktop environments like Xfce4, LXDE, and so on are way to heavy to run.
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This should be possible to build with sway (and presumably any other tiling wm). Now that I’m thinking about it, you can probably also do this with gnome and a couple of extensions.
The status bar can be achieved with waybar in sway, which can be easily configured the way you described. In gnome there is an extension to rearrange the top panel.
I’m thinking of opening each window in a new workspace, can be configured for sway and gnome has an extension for that.
For the tabs we can use waybar with sworkstyle for each wroskpace, requires some configuration. For gnome I’d just use one of the many task bar extensions.
I can’t immediately think of a solution for the searchable list, but I’d be surprised if it didn’t exist for both systems.
Since tiling is not wanted, I think gnome + extensions should be the way to go.