4 ms·
Ask HN: What are the productivity benefits of tiling window managers?
It's common for people to bring up the productivity advantages of tiling window managers on Hacker News, here's a recent thread with some examples[1].
I'd like to start out with a couple of assumptions, but please feel free to correct me on them if you aren't convinced by my reasoning:
1. A tiling window manager isn't necessary to efficiently switch between applications and windows (with or without the keyboard). The one OS I know well, macOS, has many different ways to do this without tiling windows.
2. A tiling window manager isn't necessary for programmatically customizing your window management. E.g., features like storing and retrieving window configurations, and moving and resizing windows programmatically aren't specific to tiling window managers. Again, there are macOS apps that do these things without being tiling window managers.
These assumptions are intended to keep the conversation focused on what actually differentiates a tiling window manager from a stacking window manager: That if you have two windows next to each other, and you make one of them larger, it will simultaneously make the other one smaller.
Finally, we can also safely assume that it isn't necessary to use an OS-level tiling window manager in order to be able to tile terminal windows, text editors, and file browsers, since for example, Visual Studio Code, Emacs, and vim/tmux can all tile those types of windows. But certainly points about why tiling those windows rather than stacking them is more productive would be very interesting to hear!
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791947
- throwaway8879 7y agoI think of tiling WM in terms of never having to leave my keyboard, or in other words, never having to make use of the mouse/touchpads. That itself leads to a vast boost in productivity. I haven't used macOS in a while, but when I did use divvy(?) To tile, it seemed cluncky. Something like i3 is complemented with heavy use of the terminal, which has its own productivity boost over GUI applications. Throw in vim shortcuts in Firefox and you essentially have a system that is completely usable without leaving the keyboard.
- robenkleene 7y agoNot sure about Divvy, but I use Keyboard Maestro for window management and I don't find it to be clunky. Not sure what would be clunky about it? It's just a shortcut that moves a window? Regarding the keyboard-focused part, I mentioned that in the post, I don't think there's anything inherent about a tiling window manager that makes it more keyboard-centric than a stacking window manager? Unless I'm missing something? E.g., there are tons of ways to switch between apps and windows with the keyboard on macOS, from fuzzy finders[2][3], to directional ("select the window to the left")[4], to the built-in keys to cycle between apps and windows. [1]: https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/ https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/ [2]: https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html [3]: https://manytricks.com/witch/ https://manytricks.com/witch/ [4]: https://github.com/mjolnirapp/mjolnir https://github.com/mjolnirapp/mjolnir
- chmielewski 7y agoI like my tiling WM because I use it without a Desktop Environment. DEs are bloat. I use my tiling WM with "focus follows mouse" because even though I use the keyboard "exclusively", being able to fling the cursor across the screen with your palm (from trackpad) and highlight a window without clicking is great. My remote idler and my daily driver laptops have 512MB and 1GB of RAM, respectively. I've used these every day for 8 years. If I installed a fuller-featured DE\WM either would be downright unusable.