I have a confession to make. Until yesterday, I did not have any form of dotfiles management or versioning for my Windows 11 machine. Yes, I, the person who wrote an entire tiling window manager for Windows from scratch in Rust, did not manage my dots. I had to sheepishly admit this on more than one occasion in the project Discord server when people would watch my live programming videos and then ask if I could share my Windows dotfiles repo.

I recently starting using Yubikeys both to store passkeys which allow me to do passwordless logins to websites like GitHub, and to SSH into remote servers with FIDO2. I have a number of machines at home, but I spend the majority of my time using a Windows 11 desktop computer running NixOS on WSL2 (in the past I’ve described Windows 11 + my tiling window manager komorebi as the “desktop environment” on top of my NixOS WSL2 shell).

For the last few years I have been writing and maintaining a tiling window manager for Windows that has steadily grown in usage and popularity. My first exposure to tiling window managers was on macOS with kwm (which was succeeded by chunkwm and later yabai). Naturally, this meant that whenever I used Linux, I would reach for bspwm. I am a big proponent of what I call the “bspwm architecture” for tiling window managers.