4 ms·

With a tiling window manager, every window you open has cognitive overload. Which workspace, which location on screen, is it okay if other windows resize, or do

by DCKing 8y ago

With a tiling window manager, every window you open has cognitive overload. Which workspace, which location on screen, is it okay if other windows resize, or do I have it float even? Every tile you add affects the other tiles in some way - at the very least a new tile (e.g. on a new workspace) consumes space that cannot be taken by other tiles. The reward for this additional cognitive load is that every action is concious - reducing a lot of the mess that can pile while using a comptuer. This makes them incredibly suitable for people whose computer use is predictable, organized and focused on quick parallel tasks. I understand why so many developers use them. With a stacking window manager, the cognitive overhead of opening a window is much less. You open a program, get a window with focus somewhere. You can start doing your thing immediately without considering window management. Every new window on the stack doesn't affect the others you were using. Subsequently organizing the layout of your windows to be optimized for your current workload however takes more time. This appears to me to make stacking window managers to be more suited for people whose computer use is more dynamic or less organized - people can open and close stuff on a whim. More organized vs. less cognitive load can be both a personal preference or a workload dependant thing. In case of tiling WMs it also doesn't help that they tend to have very low discoverability and depend almost exclusively on keyboard shortcuts versus GUI elements, only adding to their newbie-unfriendliness. I think that's also telling about the use cases tiling WMs are popular for. I see a lot of people that respond to you by appealing to some objective superiority of tiling window managers, but there's advantages and disadvantages to both.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
What I've been thinking is, why can't we have both? Imagine just two changes: a workspace's mode can be switched between tiling and floating, and additional workspaces are just windows. Now you can have any combination of floating and tiling that makes sense to you. You could, for instance, set your desktop to tiling mode and open two new workspace windows, the switch one to floating and run your GUI desktop stuff on the left side of the screen and several terminal tiles on the right.
- irth 8y ago
  I think AwesomeWM allows that
  - leshow 8y ago
    I used awesome for a few years and while I think you're correct to say it does try to do both, in reality it ends up doing neither very well, IMO.
- wink 8y ago
  This is the mode how I run Windows with WinSplit Revolution. It doesn't change anything by default, but with alt-keypad I move certain windows to the upper left, upper right, bottom right, bottom left and so most open applications have their exact position, but everything else is floating. I guess I'd use a full blown tiling WM if there was one, though, I don't really see any downsides once you configured it to your preference. So bad for new machines, good for regular use. (for me).
m45t3r 8y ago
> With a tiling window manager, every window you open has cognitive overload. Which workspace, which location on screen, is it okay if other windows resize, or do I have it float even? Every tile you add affects the other tiles in some way - at the very least a new tile (e.g. on a new workspace) consumes space that cannot be taken by other tiles. The reward for this additional cognitive load is that every action is concious - reducing a lot of the mess that can pile while using a comptuer. This makes them incredibly suitable for people whose computer use is predictable, organized and focused on quick parallel tasks. I understand why so many developers use them. This is not true, at least not in i3. When I don't want to think about how to position a new window I can simply switch to tabbed or stack mode, where all windows inside a determined workspace will be "maximized", and I can switch to them by changing the tab (mostly like browsers and web pages). This isn't really much different to Alt-Tabbing, except that I find more efficient (of course, this last part is IMO). It is true that on my current setup almost all workspaces have a specific usage, however I have a "trash" workspace specially created to put those things that does not make sense in any other workspace. This workspace generally runs in tabbed mode thanks to above.
zyeri 8y ago
> With a tiling window manager, every window you open has cognitive overload. I've been using a tiling window manager (XMonad) for ~3 years now; this is definitely true for the first few days (or weeks/months) until you adjust. After that, there is less overhead as you become more familiar with how the window manager behaves. But this is also true for stacking window managers. > With a stacking window manager, the cognitive overhead of opening a window is much less. I think the level of cognitive overhead involved comes down (in the case of tiling window mangers) to what window rules you have, what kind of bindings you have set up to navigate between windows, etc., and how comfortable you are with those rules and bindings; the less comfortable you are, the greater your cognitive load will be when trying to use them. Again, this is also true for stacking window managers. > Every new window on the stack doesn't affect the others you were using. Unless it "steals" focus and blocks the window you were working on. But that's expected behavior in a stacking window manager, so it's not much of a disruption. And it's one a user will certainly be aware of when opening a new window. And this can (and usually is) be true for tiling window managers as well. > I see a lot of people that respond to you by appealing to some objective superiority of tiling window managers, but there's advantages and disadvantages to both. Right. There are pros and cons to each and really, but most people just don't really care that much about what window manager they're using. I do want to add that one of the biggest pros to a tiling window manager (and a few stacking WMs) is the amount of customization available; if you're using a WM like XMonad, i3, Sway, bspwm, herbstluftwm, etc., you can configure the WM to do basically anything (including behave like a stacking WM), while many stacking WMs are fairly limited in how much customization they can have. But that makes the assumption you're interested in customizing, which not everyone is.

by DCKing 8y ago

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

What I've been thinking is, why can't we have both? Imagine just two changes: a workspace's mode can be switched between tiling and floating, and additional workspaces are just windows. Now you can have any combination of floating and tiling that makes sense to you. You could, for instance, set your desktop to tiling mode and open two new workspace windows, the switch one to floating and run your GUI desktop stuff on the left side of the screen and several terminal tiles on the right.

irth 8y ago
I think AwesomeWM allows that
- leshow 8y ago
  I used awesome for a few years and while I think you're correct to say it does try to do both, in reality it ends up doing neither very well, IMO.
wink 8y ago
This is the mode how I run Windows with WinSplit Revolution. It doesn't change anything by default, but with alt-keypad I move certain windows to the upper left, upper right, bottom right, bottom left and so most open applications have their exact position, but everything else is floating. I guess I'd use a full blown tiling WM if there was one, though, I don't really see any downsides once you configured it to your preference. So bad for new machines, good for regular use. (for me).

m45t3r 8y ago

> With a tiling window manager, every window you open has cognitive overload. Which workspace, which location on screen, is it okay if other windows resize, or do I have it float even? Every tile you add affects the other tiles in some way - at the very least a new tile (e.g. on a new workspace) consumes space that cannot be taken by other tiles. The reward for this additional cognitive load is that every action is concious - reducing a lot of the mess that can pile while using a comptuer. This makes them incredibly suitable for people whose computer use is predictable, organized and focused on quick parallel tasks. I understand why so many developers use them. This is not true, at least not in i3. When I don't want to think about how to position a new window I can simply switch to tabbed or stack mode, where all windows inside a determined workspace will be "maximized", and I can switch to them by changing the tab (mostly like browsers and web pages). This isn't really much different to Alt-Tabbing, except that I find more efficient (of course, this last part is IMO). It is true that on my current setup almost all workspaces have a specific usage, however I have a "trash" workspace specially created to put those things that does not make sense in any other workspace. This workspace generally runs in tabbed mode thanks to above.

zyeri 8y ago

> With a tiling window manager, every window you open has cognitive overload. I've been using a tiling window manager (XMonad) for ~3 years now; this is definitely true for the first few days (or weeks/months) until you adjust. After that, there is less overhead as you become more familiar with how the window manager behaves. But this is also true for stacking window managers. > With a stacking window manager, the cognitive overhead of opening a window is much less. I think the level of cognitive overhead involved comes down (in the case of tiling window mangers) to what window rules you have, what kind of bindings you have set up to navigate between windows, etc., and how comfortable you are with those rules and bindings; the less comfortable you are, the greater your cognitive load will be when trying to use them. Again, this is also true for stacking window managers. > Every new window on the stack doesn't affect the others you were using. Unless it "steals" focus and blocks the window you were working on. But that's expected behavior in a stacking window manager, so it's not much of a disruption. And it's one a user will certainly be aware of when opening a new window. And this can (and usually is) be true for tiling window managers as well. > I see a lot of people that respond to you by appealing to some objective superiority of tiling window managers, but there's advantages and disadvantages to both. Right. There are pros and cons to each and really, but most people just don't really care that much about what window manager they're using. I do want to add that one of the biggest pros to a tiling window manager (and a few stacking WMs) is the amount of customization available; if you're using a WM like XMonad, i3, Sway, bspwm, herbstluftwm, etc., you can configure the WM to do basically anything (including behave like a stacking WM), while many stacking WMs are fairly limited in how much customization they can have. But that makes the assumption you're interested in customizing, which not everyone is.