The FAQ of herbstluftwm says it’s not a fork of anything. And the first commits of bspwm look like that was written from scratch, too. (Yep, I actually spent a fair amount researching that, because it really bothers me how similar they are without being forks.)

Yeah after making that post I checked the FAQ as well as I thought there was something there about it and was too tired to update my comment. I have no issues with FLOSS projects borrowing ideas from other FLOSS projects, IMO within the FLOSS world imitation is the best form of flattery :winking face:

And I have used bspwm in the past. It’s been a major contributor to my current workflow, by being so limited that I didn’t believe it: You couldn’t minimize windows in bspwm. It just didn’t have that feature. So, when I looked up what the heck that’s about, it said to just move the window to a different workspace instead.

Yeah herbstluftwm has a similar limitation, it actually seems pretty common for the tiling WMs that I have seen. Although there is a script for herbstluftwm that adds a hacky way to do this by creating a virtual monitor that you can put appliacions on then show and hide it. I don’t use that but it exists.

That was when I stopped treating workspaces as individual compartments for different topics and instead started grouping multiple workspaces together with 1 or 2 windows per workspace, which just works a lot better for me. In a way, it takes out one layer of complexity by never minimizing windows.

That is similar to how I work, but I have a few dedicated tags (workspaces) for web browsing, IM+Chat apps, Email that has predefined layouts. Everything else is kind of fair game use.