Companion tools for tiling window managers #

I like tiling window managers. But sometimes I switch to Gnome for certain tasks. One of such cases is when I need to plug the laptop to TV to watch a movie. It can be hard to switch sound output to go through HDMI using just a pulseaudio console. In this case, gnome-settings works really well.

It would've been great if there were a few simple utilities that allow to do simple everyday things. For example:

• Mount external storage

• Change sound outputs easily

• Set external screen parameters dynamically

  A few things that I already use:

• nm-applet (for managing wifi connections)

• bashmount (for semi-automatic storage mounting)

• pavucontrol (for managing pulseaudio, though I'm not completely happy with it)

  It's not like there are no options for other use-cases. It's just that many tools that I find on the internet are too heavy and overloaded with functionality. Some of them for example are written in Python with so many dependencies that they would likely fall apart if their maintaner stops updating them.

  Well, I guess we'll have to wait until System 76 guys fuse the traditional DE with tiling approaches in their new environment. I for one would applaud something that's lighter than Gnome but covers the basics in addition to being a good tiling WM.