What exactly is a "column"?

[iandol]

Details

I've only ever used i3 and Aerospace, so Niri/Dwindle features do not fit my current experience, and I may be doing things inefficiently.

Having never used Niri, the concept of a column, as an entity separate to a window or a workspace is quite new to me. Obviously I understand the general concept in regards to matrices, but the implications of this in managing a window is not. What can these vertical strips offer, can each strip stack multiple windows vertically within them for example? There are so many keybindings for Niri mode in Omni it is a bit overwhelings and I don't know if what I see when trying different things are a feature or a bug 🤣 ?

[BarutSRB]

@iandol There is no concept of a column in tree type layouts as Niri and BSP/i3 are fundamentally different. the closest thing is a container/subtree made of child nodes. To make it easier as a mental model think of it as a workspace within workspace type of a thing, the columns/windows you see on screen are a workspace within workspace as you navigate alt+left/right arrow you are moving workspace yet still in the same parent workspace. You can stack windows vertically within the container with alt+shift+left/right arrow the amount of windows you can stack is set in the Niri tab of the gui settings window. You can also pull out a focused window from multiply stacked windows in that column by pressing alt+ctrl+shoft+[/] depending if you want to pull it out before or after the focused column. You can move columns with ctrl+alt+shift+left/right arrow keys.

There are a lot of commands some might not work yet and some are for dwindle only you can use the search bar in the hotkeys tab of the gui settings and search for Niri/dwindle and it will show you only their specific commands etc. you can change the hotkey by clicking on the default hotkeys and pressing the hotkeys you wish to use for that command if it doesn't let you it means that hotkey is already used for some other command.

Thank you for using Omni ❤️ and keep in mind the codebase is written from scratch and is only a month old so there will be bugs especially around multi-monitor as it's not finished, if you ever get a bugged out layout you can press alt+shift+b and switch between workspaces to get it unstuck/unbugged.