But in this "endless horizontal tilling" scheme, the above principle would no longer hold, right?
Things on other desktops are invisible in every WM.
The only difference with niri is the possibility for things to be left or right of the current window. Overview helps with that, but I know what I expect to be on a specific desktop (it's related to the topic) and seldom need it.
Now you want to access that terminal on /tmp/ again. Where was it?
In i3, I just spam-switch workspaces in this case, but at least I can find them. With scrollable wms, every ws can potentially hold that target app.
If you have (having had "Editor" focused, and just opened "TermT"):
Editor | (TermT) | Term | Browser
(FM) | Term | Browser | etc.
(where pipe delimits a pane and parens are the active pane), if you go "next desktop" from "TermT" (the terminal at /tmp), that moves you down the stack of desktops. Moving up the stack of desktops returns with focus on "TermT". You'd then go "left pane" from "TermT" to get back to the editor.The answer (for me) is to think of desktops as topics. The terminal on /tmp is with the things that prompted its creation. If I needed to check some log output, for example, it's with the project that made that log output.
Edit: Note that there's nothing keeping you from stacking those terms if you like, i.e., the appropriate keybinding goes from the previous to
Editor | (TermT), Term | Browser
(FM) | Term | Browser | etc.
where the terms stack vertically in the ribbon of the desktop.Vastly preferable to having to look at the edge of the screen.
You can see window titles on the tabs on the tab bar, but you can’t even see the title of windows which are in a split container of a background tab.
But yes, that wouldn't be true, though focus moves to fresh windows so it's not an issue.