My PaperWM desktop, as I write this post.

My PaperWM desktop, as I write this post.

Just before Christmas I decided to try out a GNOME extension I'd read about, PaperWM. It looked promising, but I was a little nervous about breaking my existing workflow, which was heavily reliant on the Put Windows extension.

It's great! I have had to carefully un-train some of my muscle memory but it seems to be worth it. It seems to strike a great balance between the rigidity of a tile-based window manager and a more traditional floating-windows one.

I'm always wary of coming to rely upon large extensions or plugins. The parent software is often quite hands-off about caring about supporting users of them, or breaking them by making API changes. Certainly those Firefox users who were heavily dependent on plugins prior to the Quantum fire-break are still very, very angry. (I actually returned to Firefox at that point, so I avoided the pain, and enjoy the advantages of the re-architecture). PaperWM hopefully is large enough and popular enough to avoid that fate.