3 ms·

if microsoft can pull that off, windows can really shine as a developer friendly OS

• WorldMaker 6y ago
  One of the things I loved about Windows 8.1 was that it had a Tiling Window Manager getting some real love out of the box. The Window Manager for the "modern" ("metro"/UWP) Windows apps was a tiling WM. It was limited to only vertical splits at the time, and you had to upgrade to the modern apps to get the most benefit from it (the entire Win32 desktop was just a single tile to that WM). At points in 8.1 I'd have a dozen or so tiles across 2 screens on my desktop. It was lovely, for that brief time it existed and there were enough apps to make use of it. When they inverted things back in 10 and put all the modern apps in traditional overlapping Windows, that tiling WM got crippled and relegated back to only support two tiles at a time and then only in Tablet Mode (though it got slightly smarter about semi-maximizing Win32 apps). Windows 1.x itself had only a tiling WM. (Not a great one, mind you.) There's a lot of tiling WM DNA in Windows development history. Like I said the impression I have from GitHub Issues at least is that there are an interesting number of developers of Windows (even if that's a small overall percentage of the huge Windows organization at Microsoft) interested in pursuing good tiling WM tools on Windows. I hope Fancy Zones does continue to be a good playground for exploring that.