Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet

I&#x27;m curious, did you find there were things that were easier to do <i>because</i> it&#x27;s Janet&#x2F;lisp-like language? Or you just fancied like using it (perfectly valid reason of course!).<p>I tried various lisp dialects, but I could never find the killer feature vs other languages I already use. And I can justify why I use these specific languages I do use, if that makes sense.

&gt; You can implement custom commands and hooks to trigger. It&#x27;s even possible to call native Win32 APIs in your own implementations. For example, to always move a Notepad window to the (100, 100) coordinates on your screen(s), using the low-level SetWindowPos function<p>Great job. Looks really interesting and useful. And a fun excuse to write Lisp.<p>I really appreciate it when APIs give you high-level functionality but keep the door open to lower-level APIs when you really need them.

My experiences with tiling window managers is that they struggle in judging a modal screen like a confirmation box or detachable&#x2F;dockable mini-containers like the interface of certain programs like GIMP. Considering those as new tile-able windows tends to be a hinderance instead of increasing productivity.

Janet looks really neat. And this project seems really cool. Windows DESPERATELY needs a more powerful built-in manager. It&#x27;s ridiculous to use the mouse all the time.

This looks to have great potential for accessibility! I work with individuals who use eye gaze input, where a significant part of the screen is taken up by an on-screen keyboard (including various shortcut&#x2F;macro keys as well as for typing). Having tiling options that fit within a smaller part of the screen (e.g. still allow side by side or top&#x2F;bottom split, but in a smaller total region) would be great. Particularly as Windows 11 has broken vertical docking of appbars.<p>The UI hints also look promising, but I can&#x27;t get them working. Using example-config.janet I tried pressing RAlt or RAlt+K and I get the UI hint shortcuts list coming up, but none of them seem to do anything, except in Notepad where I sometimes get the standard UI hints (that always come up here with a long press of left alt)<p>Fwiw, as a newbie I found it a bit intimidating&#x2F;off-putting that it doesn&#x27;t work out the box without choosing a config file. That&#x27;s quite a lot of extra cognitive effort and link-clicking before you can try it out. And I&#x27;m left quite unsure what I&#x27;m missing out on. Am I able to access the different documented features with the config file I have? It&#x27;s not clear.

Whoa, very cool. I love WMs, I love Lisp, and I hate Windows. This seems to be a perfect &quot;medicine&quot; for my frustration with it.

That UI hinting feature is killer. Is something similar available outside of this repo?

Jwno is great, agentkilo is kind, Lisp is magic :)

It&#x27;s not a tiling manager but slightly related: I replicated Spectacle&#x2F;Rectangle (macOS apps) on Windows a while ago to snap windows to edges&#x2F;corners&#x2F;two-thirds&#x2F;one-thirds etc a while back. If you&#x27;re interested: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ahmetb&#x2F;RectangleWin&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;README.md">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ahmetb&#x2F;RectangleWin&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;README.md</a>

Long-time StumpWM user, before I switched back to Windows a few years ago. This is super-exciting to see, and I&#x27;m going to take it for a spin. It might just address my major frustrations with arranging windows and switching between them; my monitor seems just the right shape&#x2F;resolution for the standard Windows splits to be suboptimal.<p>(Browsers, in particular, I use full-screen less and less. That annoying trend of squeezing everything into short lines &quot;because readability&quot; is just wasting too much screen space; zooming in makes everything too big, and I&#x27;m getting tired of writing userstyles or userscript to fix it for every other page I open, so I&#x27;m back to keeping 2 or 3 columns of windows running.)<p>Also, any excuse to use more Lisp is good in my book. Based on the screenshots, it looks stellar; if it works half as well as it comes across, I&#x27;ll switch over instantly.

I recently tried hyprland after using xmonad for like 10+ years and wondered about the decision to bind workspaces to displays. I didnt like that. How does Jwno handle multiple monitors? I have looked at the docs and didnt see it mention anywhere.

What kinds of automation are possible with having a scripting language inside your WM, rather than Sway-style IPC? I heard the new Windows WMs were where most pure workflow advances happen, so I wonder if they can be replicated on Linux.

This might be the coolest project I&#x27;ve seen using Janet yet!

What resource did you use to learn Janet? And did you already know lisp before? Comming from Python and php I found the &quot;Janet for mortals&quot; very difficult. It expected me to know what closures and macros are.

So amazing. I might have to use Windows soon, against my will, and this could sweeten the deal for me considerably!

Looks very good! This one is what I need

Does your project have any influence on Windows focus stealing?

Oh ! That looks cool :)

Custom windows shells (I know this is just a window manager, but still) in the year of our lord 2025? This takes me back to the days of installing bb4win and litestep in XP. I&#x27;m a kid again!

This is so cool! It&#x27;s funny because open source devs are making Windows better while MS is actively making it worse. If MS removed all telemetry and AI (and restored win10 functions in context menus), I would probably move back to it.<p>I&#x27;ve recently started playing around with Janet, and it&#x27;s a great language. I think it&#x27;s inspired by Clojure and Lua, and somehow manages to be better than both (in my opinion).

Tangential but I’ve been writing a lot of Janet recently using Joy[0], web framework, to build a small web app. Would love to hear what you learned about Janet from doing this work and how you feel about the language afterwards.<p>The one thing I’ve noticed is that it seems like Janet had a burst of interest 2020-2022 but it has since slowed down. Would love to see it become popular again. The main reason I’m using it is because I like how it’s both powerful and lightweight. I’d use clojure but I don’t want Java. I’m tempted to also try Common Lisp but so far Janet has been great.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;joy-framework&#x2F;joy">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;joy-framework&#x2F;joy</a>

I always disliked the chaos that happens quickly with application windows, and loved the idea of tiling. But none of them really worked for me practically until I found PaperWM around a year ago or so (gnome extension). It has few core shortcuts and feels more natural. Like you would really arrange applications directly on your desk. It does not limit itself by your screen width and has the nice default that a new window appears to the right of the current window (configurable). You seldomly have the need to re-arrange windows, because the default just fits 99% of all cases. In addition, you still have the comfort of gnome. No hacky config files just to get wifi working or so. For work we have OSX, and I am really missing it there (I am using rectangle there instead). <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;paperwm&#x2F;PaperWM?tab=readme-ov-file#usage">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;paperwm&#x2F;PaperWM?tab=readme-ov-file#usage</a>

How does it compare to komorebi? I&#x27;ve been using it for about 5 months with great success. I&#x27;m a Hyprland user when I&#x27;m on my personal machine, but for windows Komorebi has let me keep my muscle memory and workflow largely intact.

Just in case someone new is looking, komorebi is great:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;LGUG2Z&#x2F;komorebi">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;LGUG2Z&#x2F;komorebi</a>