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Probably an unpopular opinion here, but I do not understand why people prefer tiling window managers. I prefer to have lots of windows open, and being able to p

Probably an unpopular opinion here, but I do not understand why people prefer tiling window managers. I prefer to have lots of windows open, and being able to position them how I want with the size I want greatly increases my productivity. Tiling window managers makes you conform to their way of working.

RMPR 6y ago
Imho the main advantage is the keyboard focused navigation Edit: it is also lightweight, with proper power management (think TLP/Powertop) you can vastly improve your battery life.
dbrgn 6y ago
Most if not all tiling window managers allow you to do that by switching to a floating mode.
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  That i3 has a floating mode is good, however it's not a good floating mode for a floating-based workflow.
  - nix23 6y ago
    >however it's not a good floating mode for a floating-based workflow. It's made for "tilling incompatible" applications or stuff you want always on top, it's not made for a floating workflow.
mgreenleaf 6y ago
For some people, that _is_ their way of working, and it works very well for them. I think it is mainly the quick access with a regular, predictable arrangement completely driven by the keyboard. Low resource usage is a bonus. It is like having some of the benefits of the CLI but in graphical form.
bitwize 6y ago
Some people are more productive if they don't have to think about positioning, sizing, and switching between a bunch of overlapping windows. Tiling WMs generally let you set up and save a configuration so that all your programs always open in the same place.
mrweasel 6y ago
I feel the same way. There are projects like EvilWM, which is still rather nice, that has the 1px border and looks alot like a tiling window manager. As I get old, I started to look more toward simple Windows managers, like OpenBox. I really do like having the buttons, and a window border I can actually hit with my pointer. Personally I think it would be fun if someone cloned Windows 3.11 and added a few ekstra keyboard shortcuts.
- julius 6y ago
  Hitting borders with a pointer is horrible. No matter the border size. A few years ago I learned that most Linux WMs allow you to use ALT+RightMouse to resize your window from anywhere (sometimes WIN+RightMouse, usually configurable).
  - darkteflon 6y ago
    Having just moved from Ubuntu to MacOS, I really miss this. This, and Super + click anywhere to drag. BetterTouchTool seems to allow the use of Super by itself to drag on mouse move, but in practice Super + click is way less prone to error.
  - alecmg 6y ago
    while on topic of window adjusting shortcuts I got way too used to Win+arrow keys for moving and resizing windows, inluding in multiple monitor setups. Any Linux WM that replicates these shortcuts? Using Win+arrow I can minimize, maximize, make window stick to left or right half of screen or any of corners and move between desktops.
    - RealStickman_ 6y ago
      I think gnome has those shortcuts. TWMs let the first window fill the whole screen, with subsequent windows being opened next to that first one. Depending on the TWM there's a specific layout or you have to arrange the windows yourself. (i3 is the latter kind. Allowing for very flexible layouts, but more complicated than TWMs who follow a preset patter) TWMs are not built to minimise windows though. That's why there's also a heavy focus on using multiple workspaces. (i3s tab-mode is also useful where you'll have windows arranged similar to browser tabs)
nix23 6y ago
>Tiling window managers makes you conform to their way of working. That's not true, i often just use the tab-mode. Using tiling for a long time, i go berserk having to rearrange window's with the mouse, then one is over the other...etc, it a mess!
- aorth 6y ago
  Totally agree. I'm a 100% time tabbed Sway user. I love the simplicity, lightness, and Wayland frame-for-frame correctness of Sway, but without having to do all the tiling stuff. I prefer all windows to be maximized all the time ala GNOME Shell. For the uninformed, use Mod-W to switch windows to tabbed mode in Sway/i3. You can also organize virtual desktops in "workspaces." I keep web/music on workspace 1, terminals and IDEs on workspace 2, and email/msteams/office on workspace 3.
  - nix23 6y ago
    True, sometimes i use tilling but most of the time everything is maxed and tabbed, on top i "roll" thru my window's, on the bottom thru my workspace's.
continuational 6y ago
In what way does it make you more productive?
jordanbeiber 6y ago
For me (and most, I guess) it’s about flow! Switched to i3 on a nixos box a few months ago - never leaving the tiling vm, or nixos for that matter. I suddenly use workspaces which I never used to and I have coms in one space (mail/slack/teams), terms with vim etc in one, and web browser in a third. Never looking around for windows and draging stuff around is magical for the workflow. With fzf and a launcher & window switcher my workflow have never been more streamlined. Nixos helps as well, but that’s a different topic. :)
- byecomputer 6y ago
  In my little world, I don't need more than perhaps a few windows at attention simultaneously, and working out how to space them when it does happen is pretty breezy. The physical metaphor of dragging stuff works for me, too, and—while the Vim folks might ridicule me—I think the computer mouse is actually quite excellent and fills in the gaps quicker than remembering keyboard shortcuts for some things. Also really great for when I'm drunk, because I'm not in the mood to play spy games with the desktop when I just want the window to go over there. I can afford the calories my arm burns in the drag-n-drop process.
  - jeromenerf 6y ago
    Sway, the i3 clone for wayland, actually allows to use the mouse to drag and drop a window or group of windows. This is something supported in other window managers. The best of both worlds? I agree that the mouse can be great and effective. Plan9 / Acme editor is a great example. I also like the additional buttons when browsing, you know, prev/next.
    - byecomputer 6y ago
      I appreciate the tip. GNOME 3, which I understand had a rocky start, has been honestly the most intuitive and usable desktop I've had yet, so I can't say I'm in the market for now. But it's always fun checking new things out, so I will keep those in mind.
Normal_gaussian 6y ago
honestly I don't understand free floating window managers. Faffing around layering is slow and leads to poor window experiences (rarely is a program designed to be partially obscured). Do you persist your layouts for a long time? Rarely opening windows?
praptak 6y ago
I do prefer tiling window managers because positioning the windows is tedious work that I am basically forced to do when working with a non-tiling WM.
Barrin92 6y ago
because I think having a lot of overlapping windows is hard to work with once you're used to fully utilize keyboard navigation and easily accessible workspaces. When I'm on a Windows machine I spend so much time alt tabbing and dragging and resizing, I didn't notice it until I started using i3 on my linux machine. Five workspaces, bound to Alt 1-5, fully using the screenspace, I can almost not stand working without it any more.
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  "When I'm on a Windows machine I spend so much time alt tabbing and dragging and resizing" There's at least one tiling WM for Windows (don't recall the name off-hand, but someone here probably knows). It's also possible to run i3 itself in Windows, under Cygwin, though of course it will only manage X applications.
arghwhat 6y ago
I either need a window positioned for active usage, or don't need the window visible at all. A tiling WM not only enforces this (although it can switch to floating if needed), it handles positioning automatically so I don't need to fidget with positioning and sizing of multiple windows. It also minimizes useless fluff to make it easy to have even more windows operated in parallel. Windows, macOS, GNOME and others do various degrees of tiling as a sign of the usefulness. Even fullscreen is just a special case of tiling with 1 window. If you're a kind of person that always fullscreen things, you'll enjoy a tiling WM. (I don't understand people that work with small floating windows. It's a waste of limited screen real estate, and means you don't get to see as much of what you're working on as you could. Suboptimal.)
- jeromenerf 6y ago
  > I don't understand people that work with small floating windows. I don’t know for the floating part, I guess it is a personal thing. But for the many small windows shown at the same time, it’s pretty useful when exploring and comparing texts, data, code, logs...
  - arghwhat 6y ago
    The floating part was critical, as it was about having unused screen space. Tiling many windows (some being small) is what tiling is about.
- grep_name 6y ago
  > I don't understand people that work with small floating windows. It's a waste of limited screen real estate, and means you don't get to see as much of what you're working on as you could. Suboptimal. I use a tiling window manager at home, but when I'm at work I have to use a windows machine. I often use vim to do stuff and when I do I usually keep it to 80x24 or 80x48 (my preference is 80x24 unless what I'm working on has a lot of long function definitions). If I'm working out of a single vim window (which I've built my vimrc around to some extent), I don't need to see a lot of info at the same time, so I can put that window at exactly the part of the (enormous these days) screen which is most amenable to my neck angle, and don't have to jump around the screen much with my eyes, which helps me zone in. I'll only go full screen if I have to analyze a huge CSV dump or something, where the lines are not kept to a sensible length, or occasionally when I use vimdiff (but even then I have my defaults set so that I don't need more than 120 width to use a 2 way diff effectively). Spreading my info needlessly across the real estate feels less optimal to me I guess
alpaca128 6y ago
Have you tried static tiling window managers? For some reason those are much less popular even though I find them more pratical. Where dynamic WMs constantly rearrange all the windows with every change according to some fixed layout, the static ones work basically like Vim's windows and buffers. Meaning windows are stacked above each other by default with only the first one showing, but with some shortcuts you can split horizontally or vertically and change all split dimensions. I have used many tiling window managers and over time I gravitated away from all the dynamic WMs because they're just not flexible enough for the real world. They tend to work on the assumption that the user needs all windows on the screen all the time, and this does not make sense in many scenarios.
- mtrycz2 6y ago
  That's why you have 10 workspaces.
  - alpaca128 6y ago
    The only "workspaces" which behave correctly to solve this are DWM's tags, but in practice I find it much more cumbersome to pin windows to multiple tags than just flip through the windows, or as I often prefer, switching to a window based on fuzzy-searching its title - this has completely replaced my need for workspaces, just like I stopped using tabs in Vim once I figured out how to efficiently switch buffers. Also, when I want to quickly open a terminal on dynamic WMs I have to setup a shortcut for a floating terminal if I don't want it to rearrange everything, while on a static WM I just open a terminal and it'll have no effect on the layout by default. Ironically I find static window managers to be more comfortable to use the more dynamic my workflow and window arrangements are. i3wm isn't as bad because it doesn't enforce a fixed layout, but it's still more cumbersome once I want to quickly resize or swap around some windows on the screen.
- nix23 6y ago
  >that the user needs all windows on the screen all the time, Just press Super+w and all the window's (the new ones too) are arranged in a tab format.
- 6y ago
lmilcin 6y ago
You see, I don't need to be able to position them the way I want. I have a python script that does it for me. It recognizes apps that I have open and I wrote an algorithm to place them on the screen the way I want. It also creates what I call scenes, which allows me to select from couple different dynamic arrangements of windows depending on what I work on. I can also able to instantly decide what windows are on both monitors by having a simple script when I select a desktop and it is being brought to primary monitor and contents of primary monitor is pushed to secondary monitor. By pressing two key shortcuts in short succession I can almost instantly set any arbitrary windows on both monitors without moving my mouse. Now, this would be difficult to organize on another WM, but is a breeze on i3.
3np 6y ago
I do think it comes down to personal preferences a lot. I've been tiling-only (save for a couple of secondary things) for over a decade and it's by far the most productive to me. Always having 100% screen used, no windows overlapping (apart from things like file dialogs, alerts and my "quake console"), and never having to touch the mouse for navigating/repositioning is great. It works great both on a single laptop, and with 3 external monitors (of which one generally has a single workspace hardcoded). I fully utilize all 9/10 workspaces most days. The only time it doesn't fit great is with e.g. GIMP that has several small windows for toolboxes and stuff - one can still target particular windows to be floating (either keybind at runtime or with static config targeting window names/classes/whatnot). There's no way I'm switching away from Xmonad for my main workstation - but you do you!
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  "The only time it doesn't fit great is with e.g. GIMP that has several small windows for toolboxes and stuff" You could try running GIMP in single-window mode (via GIMP's menu option: Windows -> Single-Window Mode). It doesn't get rid of every little window GIMP has, as it'll still pop up windows for saving files, for example, but it's much better than multi-window mode, if you don't want to bother with lots of little windows.
  - 3np 6y ago
    Didn't know that, thanks!
  - cycomanic 6y ago
    Thanks so much! Didn't know that there was now a single window mode.
  - simlevesque 6y ago
    You mean, the Photoshop mode.
- cycomanic 6y ago
  Yes GIMP is the one application, that really works poorly under tiling window managers. I've had a setup previously that would automatically layout the different windows (I think that was when I was still using awesomewm), but that also worked poorly. Has anyone found a way to work well with GIMP in a tiling WM?
profsnuggles 6y ago
You may be talking about auto-tilers like xmonad. Those are the devil (joking, sorta). My favorite tiling window managers in order of preference would probably be exwm (emacs wm) -> stumpwm -> ratpoison -> i3. These are manual tiling wms. So in exwm I can chose how to position and resize my windows any way I want. For example I can hit C-x 3 to split my screen in half vertically then C-x 2 to split one of the vertical splits horizontally. Now I have +----------+-----------+ | | | | | | | +-----------+ | | | | | | +----------+-----------+ I can resize the vertical and horizontal splits, add or remove splits and cycle between the splits and the windows they display with regular emacs commands. The only thing you can't do is have windows overlap so you can only see part of their contents. i3 comes last in my preferences because it adds a bit more friction to this with it's concept of containers. It seems to me like that covers 99% of use cases. I don't see very much value in being able to only see some of a window when it is being overlapped. Especially when if I need to see only a few lines of a window it would only be a few keystrokes away. Maybe C-o 2 C-x 3 C-x - C-x b window title which looks crazy but if you are a heavy emacs user with ace-window and ivy mode it's very natural.
- bitigchi 6y ago
  I think this is the most popular setup for tiling window managers, I use my terminal windows in this configuration as well (on a separate display). However, on my main display, I can't imagine going like this, most because: - macOS "Zoom" functionality already takes care of the optimal content size. - For websites, above zoom functionality works fine, but I prefer to manually resize my browser, since nearly all websites today have responsive design, and resizing gets rid of all the unnecessary parts, like sidebars, large margins etc. All I have left is the content. - Today most application GUIs are way too bloated. I usually disable whatever I do not need, and use the macOS global menu search functionality a lot. I can reach any feature I want with a few keyboard clack. This way I can use software with minimal screen estate. - If things get a bit crowded, Mission Control (Exposé) feature allows me to see what's going on very easily. macOS trackpad features also help a lot, with intuitive multi-finger gestures to see MC, show desktop, or show individual application windows. - As a personal taste, I like to take the desktop metaphor a tad more seriously. I like to have file clusters on my desktop without the limitations of a grid, and file them to a folder later on when I'm done. Imagining my desktop as a real desktop just makes me more productive. I really cannot imagine myself using any other system other than macOS or Haiku just for this reason.
boudin 6y ago
For me it's the opposite. I find floating window manager like Windows, MacOS, Gnome, Kde really inefficient at managing screen space. Even more now that we have big screens. Tilling window managers for me brings a few things: * Almost never require to resize or position a window, the window manager optimise the layout for you. It removes the constant needs of organizing window * Combine with workspaces and multiple monitors makes working with a lot of windows so much easier * Finally, and this is the most important win for me, it is easy to manage everything with a keyboard. Even the few times I need to resize windows, it's such a pleasure to resize all the windows of the current workspace in one go with a simple keyboard shortcut. It takes a bit of time to get used to it, especially since most tilling window manager I've used require a bit of customisation to bet to my taste but once I've been used to it, going back to clicking on menus, moving things around with a mouse or a touchpad is just not possible. I find this so inefficient, exhausting and, first and foremost, something that should be avoidable.
- indymike 6y ago
  KDE actually can be a really nice tiling window manager. I use a script called Krohnkite. You can even turn off window decorations if you don't want titlebars. There are several other window management scripts that implement different layouts.
  - boudin 6y ago
    Gnome has a few plugins that adds tilling (paperwm which brings some interesting concepts, pop-shell which is quite good) but in the end I never found the experienced as polished as pure tilling ones. On Gnome i really dislike the fact that workspaces are only on one monitor OR span across all monitors. I really like my workspaces per monitor. I remember not liking how KDE was handling workspaces as well, but it's been a while I've tried so it might have changed since.
zamalek 6y ago
I'd wager that most people use a maximized window 95% of the time and only cascade windows the other 5% in order to drag things between them. That's the ideal scenario for tiling windows. You may work differently. There are hybrid tiling window managers, like PopOS Shell. You can easily turn it on/off, including specific windows that you want to always cascade.
simias 6y ago
Most tiling WMs are highly configurable, so the idea is that you script them to your tastes and then they do the work for you. I use a rather heavily customized version of dwm myself, and I have things like custom placement rule: I want my editor to be in a specific "workspace" (or tag, in dwm parlance), I have keybindings to focus my editor, my terminal or my web browser in one single keystroke regardless of where I am (I always cringe a bit when I watch colleagues feverishly alt-tabbing to find the window they're looking for), I have added custom "sticky" windows that appear in all workspaces etc... It takes a while to set up at first but I think it's well worth it in the long run. When I have to use a normal desktop environment on a different computer everything feels clunky and more complicated than it should be.
d_tr 6y ago
At least some tiling window managers are very flexible. The only tiling window manager I have used for a substantial amount of time is Sway, and it doesn't actually make it any harder to move and resize windows however you want than it is in, say, Gnome or Plasma. You can move and resize floating as well as tiled windows with drag and drop, and you additionally have lots of automatic arrangement options when you need them.
kingaillas 6y ago
For me, part of it was a touch of OCD about getting windows positioned just right. Especially terminal windows, I had to line them up, get them the same size, etc. I would spend a lot of time trying to get windows as large as possible, but not overlap, in order to use ALL the space of my monitor(s). I tried out i3 for a while and generally liked it, but was never wizard-like with manipulating my tile stack. I could split horizontally and vertically, and swap around to a degree. Enough to get by and most importantly, line it all up and use all the space. ;) These days, all the systems I use support the 98% use case I had for i3: either full screen, or vertical split (by dragging all the way right or left). I further discovered tmux so I can split a terminal window extra as needed. So, I haven't used i3 in a few years. You mentioned you prefer lots of windows open? I'm 100% the opposite. I only want to see two at a time. At work I have two monitors and one is editor, the other is tmux'ed terminal, both maximized. Browser, maximized on one monitor. Document of some kind (pdf, etc.)? Maximized on the other monitor. At any time I'm selecting which two to see. Chat apps for group communication? I hide those because they are hugely distracting. (I check them now and then when I take a short break). At home I do something similar using virtual desktops, since I only have one monitor: browser in one virtual desktop, ebook or document in another, etc.
aap_ 6y ago
You're not alone. I'm also not a fan of tiling window managers. i tried to like them once but i just don't. I feel like tiling wms result in less chaos on the screen and that just doesn't work for me.
pmoriarty 6y ago
"I prefer to have lots of windows open, and being able to position them how I want with the size I want greatly increases my productivity." That's just way too fiddly and time-consuming for me. 99% of the time I want my windows maximized and stacked behind each other. i3 does this for me automatically, and requires absolutely no interaction from me to have them set up the way I want. If I was using a floating window manager for that, I'd have to manually maximize them and manually stack them. If I want windows to be positioned in some custom layout that I use one time and never again, there is no difference between i3 and floating window managers, because i3 lets me do exactly that in the same way as floating window managers do, as I can float any window in i3 and position and resize it normally. However, if I want to repeat a particular window layout then I can configure i3 to automatically put windows in that layout. I used to do this with GIMP a long time ago, before it had single-window mode. Now I just use it as a single maximized window, and don't bother with that. I make popup windows float, so those will appear centered and disappear without changing my window layout, as one would expect of popup windows. Occasionally I'll manually float a window, when I want the kind of control you're talking about, or when I want it to overlap my default maximized window for some reason, but that's pretty rare.
hibbelig 6y ago
Well, the normal window management makes you confirm to its way of working, too! For each window, at each point in time, you have to decide what the size and position should be. At one point I had lots of windows open and positioned them how I wanted with the size I wanted, every time I used them. Then I realized that the positions and sizes actually didn't change for certain windows. And I hated having to move windows around all the time! For example, my email program could always be in the same position with the same size, no need to make changes to this from one day to another. Currently, I've got keyboard shortcuts to move the current window to a position/size I like. E.g. one keyboard shortcut for "covers 100% of the screen", another for "covers the right 75% (and 100% of the height) of the screen", and so on. But this approach restricts you to specific arrangements of windows. E.g. if you want to have a "right 75%" window on top, with a "100%" window below it so that the left bit "peeks out", but the windows aren't always the same, then it gets more cumbersome to arrange it. (In my case that doesn't apply because there is only one application that I run in "right 75%" mode and there are only two that I want to peek out from underneath.) Tiling gives you convenient ways to have different arrangements without having to invest a lot of manual work, and for some people this is useful. For example, dwm provides a layout of two columns, where a single tall window goes in the left column and the other windows go in the right column, stacked above each other. It is really easy to go through the windows, and it is also really easy to move one window into the left column. So you can have a main window that you are working in (in the left column) while you can watch the other windows on the right. And it's really convenient to to change the window you're working in, and you can always follow what is going on in the other windows. I encourage you to try this different way of working for a bit. Maybe you can learn something from it. Perhaps it teaches you something new so that you an adapt the way you work.
- bitigchi 6y ago
  I appreciate the post, but I'm already part-time using dwm on a Linux machine, and I'm still struggling. The screen size of that machine is smaller, so it's acceptable, but I'd never be able to use it on my main display, it's just too much wasted screen space.
slightwinder 6y ago
> Tiling window managers makes you conform to their way of working. The User is defining the way a tilling manager works, so all you do is conforming to your own way, but with a more efficient tool. Manual window managment is not worth the timewaste in most usecases. And for the rare cases where it's still neccessary the better WMs still allow manual settings.

RMPR 6y ago

Imho the main advantage is the keyboard focused navigation Edit: it is also lightweight, with proper power management (think TLP/Powertop) you can vastly improve your battery life.

dbrgn 6y ago

Most if not all tiling window managers allow you to do that by switching to a floating mode.

johannes1234321 6y ago
That i3 has a floating mode is good, however it's not a good floating mode for a floating-based workflow.
- nix23 6y ago
  >however it's not a good floating mode for a floating-based workflow. It's made for "tilling incompatible" applications or stuff you want always on top, it's not made for a floating workflow.

mgreenleaf 6y ago

For some people, that _is_ their way of working, and it works very well for them. I think it is mainly the quick access with a regular, predictable arrangement completely driven by the keyboard. Low resource usage is a bonus. It is like having some of the benefits of the CLI but in graphical form.

bitwize 6y ago

Some people are more productive if they don't have to think about positioning, sizing, and switching between a bunch of overlapping windows. Tiling WMs generally let you set up and save a configuration so that all your programs always open in the same place.

mrweasel 6y ago

I feel the same way. There are projects like EvilWM, which is still rather nice, that has the 1px border and looks alot like a tiling window manager. As I get old, I started to look more toward simple Windows managers, like OpenBox. I really do like having the buttons, and a window border I can actually hit with my pointer. Personally I think it would be fun if someone cloned Windows 3.11 and added a few ekstra keyboard shortcuts.

julius 6y ago
Hitting borders with a pointer is horrible. No matter the border size. A few years ago I learned that most Linux WMs allow you to use ALT+RightMouse to resize your window from anywhere (sometimes WIN+RightMouse, usually configurable).
- darkteflon 6y ago
  Having just moved from Ubuntu to MacOS, I really miss this. This, and Super + click anywhere to drag. BetterTouchTool seems to allow the use of Super by itself to drag on mouse move, but in practice Super + click is way less prone to error.
- alecmg 6y ago
  while on topic of window adjusting shortcuts I got way too used to Win+arrow keys for moving and resizing windows, inluding in multiple monitor setups. Any Linux WM that replicates these shortcuts? Using Win+arrow I can minimize, maximize, make window stick to left or right half of screen or any of corners and move between desktops.
  - RealStickman_ 6y ago
    I think gnome has those shortcuts. TWMs let the first window fill the whole screen, with subsequent windows being opened next to that first one. Depending on the TWM there's a specific layout or you have to arrange the windows yourself. (i3 is the latter kind. Allowing for very flexible layouts, but more complicated than TWMs who follow a preset patter) TWMs are not built to minimise windows though. That's why there's also a heavy focus on using multiple workspaces. (i3s tab-mode is also useful where you'll have windows arranged similar to browser tabs)

nix23 6y ago

>Tiling window managers makes you conform to their way of working. That's not true, i often just use the tab-mode. Using tiling for a long time, i go berserk having to rearrange window's with the mouse, then one is over the other...etc, it a mess!

aorth 6y ago
Totally agree. I'm a 100% time tabbed Sway user. I love the simplicity, lightness, and Wayland frame-for-frame correctness of Sway, but without having to do all the tiling stuff. I prefer all windows to be maximized all the time ala GNOME Shell. For the uninformed, use Mod-W to switch windows to tabbed mode in Sway/i3. You can also organize virtual desktops in "workspaces." I keep web/music on workspace 1, terminals and IDEs on workspace 2, and email/msteams/office on workspace 3.
- nix23 6y ago
  True, sometimes i use tilling but most of the time everything is maxed and tabbed, on top i "roll" thru my window's, on the bottom thru my workspace's.

continuational 6y ago

In what way does it make you more productive?

jordanbeiber 6y ago

For me (and most, I guess) it’s about flow! Switched to i3 on a nixos box a few months ago - never leaving the tiling vm, or nixos for that matter. I suddenly use workspaces which I never used to and I have coms in one space (mail/slack/teams), terms with vim etc in one, and web browser in a third. Never looking around for windows and draging stuff around is magical for the workflow. With fzf and a launcher & window switcher my workflow have never been more streamlined. Nixos helps as well, but that’s a different topic. :)

byecomputer 6y ago
In my little world, I don't need more than perhaps a few windows at attention simultaneously, and working out how to space them when it does happen is pretty breezy. The physical metaphor of dragging stuff works for me, too, and—while the Vim folks might ridicule me—I think the computer mouse is actually quite excellent and fills in the gaps quicker than remembering keyboard shortcuts for some things. Also really great for when I'm drunk, because I'm not in the mood to play spy games with the desktop when I just want the window to go over there. I can afford the calories my arm burns in the drag-n-drop process.
- jeromenerf 6y ago
  Sway, the i3 clone for wayland, actually allows to use the mouse to drag and drop a window or group of windows. This is something supported in other window managers. The best of both worlds? I agree that the mouse can be great and effective. Plan9 / Acme editor is a great example. I also like the additional buttons when browsing, you know, prev/next.
  - byecomputer 6y ago
    I appreciate the tip. GNOME 3, which I understand had a rocky start, has been honestly the most intuitive and usable desktop I've had yet, so I can't say I'm in the market for now. But it's always fun checking new things out, so I will keep those in mind.

Normal_gaussian 6y ago

honestly I don't understand free floating window managers. Faffing around layering is slow and leads to poor window experiences (rarely is a program designed to be partially obscured). Do you persist your layouts for a long time? Rarely opening windows?

praptak 6y ago

I do prefer tiling window managers because positioning the windows is tedious work that I am basically forced to do when working with a non-tiling WM.

Barrin92 6y ago

because I think having a lot of overlapping windows is hard to work with once you're used to fully utilize keyboard navigation and easily accessible workspaces. When I'm on a Windows machine I spend so much time alt tabbing and dragging and resizing, I didn't notice it until I started using i3 on my linux machine. Five workspaces, bound to Alt 1-5, fully using the screenspace, I can almost not stand working without it any more.

pmoriarty 6y ago
"When I'm on a Windows machine I spend so much time alt tabbing and dragging and resizing" There's at least one tiling WM for Windows (don't recall the name off-hand, but someone here probably knows). It's also possible to run i3 itself in Windows, under Cygwin, though of course it will only manage X applications.

arghwhat 6y ago

I either need a window positioned for active usage, or don't need the window visible at all. A tiling WM not only enforces this (although it can switch to floating if needed), it handles positioning automatically so I don't need to fidget with positioning and sizing of multiple windows. It also minimizes useless fluff to make it easy to have even more windows operated in parallel. Windows, macOS, GNOME and others do various degrees of tiling as a sign of the usefulness. Even fullscreen is just a special case of tiling with 1 window. If you're a kind of person that always fullscreen things, you'll enjoy a tiling WM. (I don't understand people that work with small floating windows. It's a waste of limited screen real estate, and means you don't get to see as much of what you're working on as you could. Suboptimal.)

jeromenerf 6y ago
> I don't understand people that work with small floating windows. I don’t know for the floating part, I guess it is a personal thing. But for the many small windows shown at the same time, it’s pretty useful when exploring and comparing texts, data, code, logs...
- arghwhat 6y ago
  The floating part was critical, as it was about having unused screen space. Tiling many windows (some being small) is what tiling is about.
grep_name 6y ago
> I don't understand people that work with small floating windows. It's a waste of limited screen real estate, and means you don't get to see as much of what you're working on as you could. Suboptimal. I use a tiling window manager at home, but when I'm at work I have to use a windows machine. I often use vim to do stuff and when I do I usually keep it to 80x24 or 80x48 (my preference is 80x24 unless what I'm working on has a lot of long function definitions). If I'm working out of a single vim window (which I've built my vimrc around to some extent), I don't need to see a lot of info at the same time, so I can put that window at exactly the part of the (enormous these days) screen which is most amenable to my neck angle, and don't have to jump around the screen much with my eyes, which helps me zone in. I'll only go full screen if I have to analyze a huge CSV dump or something, where the lines are not kept to a sensible length, or occasionally when I use vimdiff (but even then I have my defaults set so that I don't need more than 120 width to use a 2 way diff effectively). Spreading my info needlessly across the real estate feels less optimal to me I guess

alpaca128 6y ago

Have you tried static tiling window managers? For some reason those are much less popular even though I find them more pratical. Where dynamic WMs constantly rearrange all the windows with every change according to some fixed layout, the static ones work basically like Vim's windows and buffers. Meaning windows are stacked above each other by default with only the first one showing, but with some shortcuts you can split horizontally or vertically and change all split dimensions. I have used many tiling window managers and over time I gravitated away from all the dynamic WMs because they're just not flexible enough for the real world. They tend to work on the assumption that the user needs all windows on the screen all the time, and this does not make sense in many scenarios.

mtrycz2 6y ago
That's why you have 10 workspaces.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  The only "workspaces" which behave correctly to solve this are DWM's tags, but in practice I find it much more cumbersome to pin windows to multiple tags than just flip through the windows, or as I often prefer, switching to a window based on fuzzy-searching its title - this has completely replaced my need for workspaces, just like I stopped using tabs in Vim once I figured out how to efficiently switch buffers. Also, when I want to quickly open a terminal on dynamic WMs I have to setup a shortcut for a floating terminal if I don't want it to rearrange everything, while on a static WM I just open a terminal and it'll have no effect on the layout by default. Ironically I find static window managers to be more comfortable to use the more dynamic my workflow and window arrangements are. i3wm isn't as bad because it doesn't enforce a fixed layout, but it's still more cumbersome once I want to quickly resize or swap around some windows on the screen.
nix23 6y ago
>that the user needs all windows on the screen all the time, Just press Super+w and all the window's (the new ones too) are arranged in a tab format.
6y ago

lmilcin 6y ago

You see, I don't need to be able to position them the way I want. I have a python script that does it for me. It recognizes apps that I have open and I wrote an algorithm to place them on the screen the way I want. It also creates what I call scenes, which allows me to select from couple different dynamic arrangements of windows depending on what I work on. I can also able to instantly decide what windows are on both monitors by having a simple script when I select a desktop and it is being brought to primary monitor and contents of primary monitor is pushed to secondary monitor. By pressing two key shortcuts in short succession I can almost instantly set any arbitrary windows on both monitors without moving my mouse. Now, this would be difficult to organize on another WM, but is a breeze on i3.

3np 6y ago

I do think it comes down to personal preferences a lot. I've been tiling-only (save for a couple of secondary things) for over a decade and it's by far the most productive to me. Always having 100% screen used, no windows overlapping (apart from things like file dialogs, alerts and my "quake console"), and never having to touch the mouse for navigating/repositioning is great. It works great both on a single laptop, and with 3 external monitors (of which one generally has a single workspace hardcoded). I fully utilize all 9/10 workspaces most days. The only time it doesn't fit great is with e.g. GIMP that has several small windows for toolboxes and stuff - one can still target particular windows to be floating (either keybind at runtime or with static config targeting window names/classes/whatnot). There's no way I'm switching away from Xmonad for my main workstation - but you do you!

pmoriarty 6y ago
"The only time it doesn't fit great is with e.g. GIMP that has several small windows for toolboxes and stuff" You could try running GIMP in single-window mode (via GIMP's menu option: Windows -> Single-Window Mode). It doesn't get rid of every little window GIMP has, as it'll still pop up windows for saving files, for example, but it's much better than multi-window mode, if you don't want to bother with lots of little windows.
- 3np 6y ago
  Didn't know that, thanks!
- cycomanic 6y ago
  Thanks so much! Didn't know that there was now a single window mode.
- simlevesque 6y ago
  You mean, the Photoshop mode.
cycomanic 6y ago
Yes GIMP is the one application, that really works poorly under tiling window managers. I've had a setup previously that would automatically layout the different windows (I think that was when I was still using awesomewm), but that also worked poorly. Has anyone found a way to work well with GIMP in a tiling WM?

profsnuggles 6y ago

You may be talking about auto-tilers like xmonad. Those are the devil (joking, sorta). My favorite tiling window managers in order of preference would probably be exwm (emacs wm) -> stumpwm -> ratpoison -> i3. These are manual tiling wms. So in exwm I can chose how to position and resize my windows any way I want. For example I can hit C-x 3 to split my screen in half vertically then C-x 2 to split one of the vertical splits horizontally. Now I have +----------+-----------+ | | | | | | | +-----------+ | | | | | | +----------+-----------+ I can resize the vertical and horizontal splits, add or remove splits and cycle between the splits and the windows they display with regular emacs commands. The only thing you can't do is have windows overlap so you can only see part of their contents. i3 comes last in my preferences because it adds a bit more friction to this with it's concept of containers. It seems to me like that covers 99% of use cases. I don't see very much value in being able to only see some of a window when it is being overlapped. Especially when if I need to see only a few lines of a window it would only be a few keystrokes away. Maybe C-o 2 C-x 3 C-x - C-x b window title which looks crazy but if you are a heavy emacs user with ace-window and ivy mode it's very natural.

bitigchi 6y ago
I think this is the most popular setup for tiling window managers, I use my terminal windows in this configuration as well (on a separate display). However, on my main display, I can't imagine going like this, most because: - macOS "Zoom" functionality already takes care of the optimal content size. - For websites, above zoom functionality works fine, but I prefer to manually resize my browser, since nearly all websites today have responsive design, and resizing gets rid of all the unnecessary parts, like sidebars, large margins etc. All I have left is the content. - Today most application GUIs are way too bloated. I usually disable whatever I do not need, and use the macOS global menu search functionality a lot. I can reach any feature I want with a few keyboard clack. This way I can use software with minimal screen estate. - If things get a bit crowded, Mission Control (Exposé) feature allows me to see what's going on very easily. macOS trackpad features also help a lot, with intuitive multi-finger gestures to see MC, show desktop, or show individual application windows. - As a personal taste, I like to take the desktop metaphor a tad more seriously. I like to have file clusters on my desktop without the limitations of a grid, and file them to a folder later on when I'm done. Imagining my desktop as a real desktop just makes me more productive. I really cannot imagine myself using any other system other than macOS or Haiku just for this reason.

boudin 6y ago

For me it's the opposite. I find floating window manager like Windows, MacOS, Gnome, Kde really inefficient at managing screen space. Even more now that we have big screens. Tilling window managers for me brings a few things: * Almost never require to resize or position a window, the window manager optimise the layout for you. It removes the constant needs of organizing window * Combine with workspaces and multiple monitors makes working with a lot of windows so much easier * Finally, and this is the most important win for me, it is easy to manage everything with a keyboard. Even the few times I need to resize windows, it's such a pleasure to resize all the windows of the current workspace in one go with a simple keyboard shortcut. It takes a bit of time to get used to it, especially since most tilling window manager I've used require a bit of customisation to bet to my taste but once I've been used to it, going back to clicking on menus, moving things around with a mouse or a touchpad is just not possible. I find this so inefficient, exhausting and, first and foremost, something that should be avoidable.

indymike 6y ago
KDE actually can be a really nice tiling window manager. I use a script called Krohnkite. You can even turn off window decorations if you don't want titlebars. There are several other window management scripts that implement different layouts.
- boudin 6y ago
  Gnome has a few plugins that adds tilling (paperwm which brings some interesting concepts, pop-shell which is quite good) but in the end I never found the experienced as polished as pure tilling ones. On Gnome i really dislike the fact that workspaces are only on one monitor OR span across all monitors. I really like my workspaces per monitor. I remember not liking how KDE was handling workspaces as well, but it's been a while I've tried so it might have changed since.

zamalek 6y ago

I'd wager that most people use a maximized window 95% of the time and only cascade windows the other 5% in order to drag things between them. That's the ideal scenario for tiling windows. You may work differently. There are hybrid tiling window managers, like PopOS Shell. You can easily turn it on/off, including specific windows that you want to always cascade.

simias 6y ago

Most tiling WMs are highly configurable, so the idea is that you script them to your tastes and then they do the work for you. I use a rather heavily customized version of dwm myself, and I have things like custom placement rule: I want my editor to be in a specific "workspace" (or tag, in dwm parlance), I have keybindings to focus my editor, my terminal or my web browser in one single keystroke regardless of where I am (I always cringe a bit when I watch colleagues feverishly alt-tabbing to find the window they're looking for), I have added custom "sticky" windows that appear in all workspaces etc... It takes a while to set up at first but I think it's well worth it in the long run. When I have to use a normal desktop environment on a different computer everything feels clunky and more complicated than it should be.

d_tr 6y ago

At least some tiling window managers are very flexible. The only tiling window manager I have used for a substantial amount of time is Sway, and it doesn't actually make it any harder to move and resize windows however you want than it is in, say, Gnome or Plasma. You can move and resize floating as well as tiled windows with drag and drop, and you additionally have lots of automatic arrangement options when you need them.

kingaillas 6y ago

For me, part of it was a touch of OCD about getting windows positioned just right. Especially terminal windows, I had to line them up, get them the same size, etc. I would spend a lot of time trying to get windows as large as possible, but not overlap, in order to use ALL the space of my monitor(s). I tried out i3 for a while and generally liked it, but was never wizard-like with manipulating my tile stack. I could split horizontally and vertically, and swap around to a degree. Enough to get by and most importantly, line it all up and use all the space. ;) These days, all the systems I use support the 98% use case I had for i3: either full screen, or vertical split (by dragging all the way right or left). I further discovered tmux so I can split a terminal window extra as needed. So, I haven't used i3 in a few years. You mentioned you prefer lots of windows open? I'm 100% the opposite. I only want to see two at a time. At work I have two monitors and one is editor, the other is tmux'ed terminal, both maximized. Browser, maximized on one monitor. Document of some kind (pdf, etc.)? Maximized on the other monitor. At any time I'm selecting which two to see. Chat apps for group communication? I hide those because they are hugely distracting. (I check them now and then when I take a short break). At home I do something similar using virtual desktops, since I only have one monitor: browser in one virtual desktop, ebook or document in another, etc.

aap_ 6y ago

You're not alone. I'm also not a fan of tiling window managers. i tried to like them once but i just don't. I feel like tiling wms result in less chaos on the screen and that just doesn't work for me.

pmoriarty 6y ago

"I prefer to have lots of windows open, and being able to position them how I want with the size I want greatly increases my productivity." That's just way too fiddly and time-consuming for me. 99% of the time I want my windows maximized and stacked behind each other. i3 does this for me automatically, and requires absolutely no interaction from me to have them set up the way I want. If I was using a floating window manager for that, I'd have to manually maximize them and manually stack them. If I want windows to be positioned in some custom layout that I use one time and never again, there is no difference between i3 and floating window managers, because i3 lets me do exactly that in the same way as floating window managers do, as I can float any window in i3 and position and resize it normally. However, if I want to repeat a particular window layout then I can configure i3 to automatically put windows in that layout. I used to do this with GIMP a long time ago, before it had single-window mode. Now I just use it as a single maximized window, and don't bother with that. I make popup windows float, so those will appear centered and disappear without changing my window layout, as one would expect of popup windows. Occasionally I'll manually float a window, when I want the kind of control you're talking about, or when I want it to overlap my default maximized window for some reason, but that's pretty rare.

hibbelig 6y ago

Well, the normal window management makes you confirm to its way of working, too! For each window, at each point in time, you have to decide what the size and position should be. At one point I had lots of windows open and positioned them how I wanted with the size I wanted, every time I used them. Then I realized that the positions and sizes actually didn't change for certain windows. And I hated having to move windows around all the time! For example, my email program could always be in the same position with the same size, no need to make changes to this from one day to another. Currently, I've got keyboard shortcuts to move the current window to a position/size I like. E.g. one keyboard shortcut for "covers 100% of the screen", another for "covers the right 75% (and 100% of the height) of the screen", and so on. But this approach restricts you to specific arrangements of windows. E.g. if you want to have a "right 75%" window on top, with a "100%" window below it so that the left bit "peeks out", but the windows aren't always the same, then it gets more cumbersome to arrange it. (In my case that doesn't apply because there is only one application that I run in "right 75%" mode and there are only two that I want to peek out from underneath.) Tiling gives you convenient ways to have different arrangements without having to invest a lot of manual work, and for some people this is useful. For example, dwm provides a layout of two columns, where a single tall window goes in the left column and the other windows go in the right column, stacked above each other. It is really easy to go through the windows, and it is also really easy to move one window into the left column. So you can have a main window that you are working in (in the left column) while you can watch the other windows on the right. And it's really convenient to to change the window you're working in, and you can always follow what is going on in the other windows. I encourage you to try this different way of working for a bit. Maybe you can learn something from it. Perhaps it teaches you something new so that you an adapt the way you work.

bitigchi 6y ago
I appreciate the post, but I'm already part-time using dwm on a Linux machine, and I'm still struggling. The screen size of that machine is smaller, so it's acceptable, but I'd never be able to use it on my main display, it's just too much wasted screen space.

slightwinder 6y ago

> Tiling window managers makes you conform to their way of working. The User is defining the way a tilling manager works, so all you do is conforming to your own way, but with a more efficient tool. Manual window managment is not worth the timewaste in most usecases. And for the rare cases where it's still neccessary the better WMs still allow manual settings.