A Tiling Window Manager Workflow, Then and Now

Between late 2020 and late 2021 I wrote four posts that, read together, are a small autobiography of a Linux phase:

• What is Ricing? (2020): deciding to learn Linux properly through ArcoLinux, with a list of goals that included “I want to be able to show off” and “I want original dotfiles I can share”.
• The Arch Experience (2021): giving up on Linux in a Windows virtual machine, then reinstalling Arch about nine times in a weekend until I actually understood each step.
• Eww! Yuck! (2021): replacing a cluttered Conky desktop with Eww widgets showing exactly what I cared about.
• The Ultimate XMonad Workflow (2021): an ultrawide monitor, a tiling window manager, tmux, a programmable keyboard and a pen-and-paper bullet journal, all working together.

I’m on macOS now. Most of those tools are gone. Almost all of the habits survived.

What the ricing years taught me

Reinstalling teaches you the system. The Arch post is the most honest of the four. The first installs were painful, then each one got easier until I understood what every step was for. That’s still how I learn new tools: break it, rebuild it, write down what you learnt.

Fewer, better tools. I wrote that a minimal system leaves more RAM for the programs you choose and “less mental clog”. The less you install, the more proficient you can be in each tool. It’s the same argument as You Can’t Serve Two Masters, applied to software.

Show what matters, hide the rest. My Eww post was really about information design. The old Conky setup was “as flashy as possible”, and I replaced it with a todo list, a clock I could actually read, and audio controls. I later found the grown-up version of that instinct in Tufte (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information).

Tiling saves attention. On a 49-inch ultrawide, macOS and Windows had me constantly dragging and resizing windows. A tiling window manager put each window in a predictable place, on a stable workspace, so switching became muscle memory.

Sessions beat setup. tmux sessions meant I could switch from work to personal projects without closing anything, and pick up exactly where I left off the next morning, even over SSH.

Then and now

Then (Linux, 2021)	Now (macOS, 2026)
XMonad, i3	AeroSpace (tiling for macOS)
polybar, Eww, Conky	sketchybar
rofi	Raycast
alacritty, kitty	WezTerm
tmux	tmux, now with a session per git worktree
Planck EZ	ZSA Voyager split board, same layout on every keyboard
Vimwiki bullet journal	Obsidian, with an AI librarian distilling my daily notes

All of it lives in my dotfiles, which are the real continuity between the two eras (Dotfiles: An Environment That Follows Me). The keyboard side is in Typing Speed and a Keyboard-First Setup, and the tmux and worktree scripts in Git Worktrees: A Desk per Branch.

What I’d say to my 2020 self

Ricing for its own sake is a lovely hobby and a poor productivity strategy. The parts worth keeping are the ones that removed friction, not the ones that looked good in a screenshot. And write it all down in git, because you’ll want it on the next machine.

---

Originally written in 2020–21 → What is Ricing?, The Arch Experience, Eww! Yuck! and The Ultimate XMonad Workflow