3 ms·

I was under the impression that ratpoison was considered a tiling WM.

• silentbicycle 18y ago
  Actually, you're right, I wasn't specific enough. Automatically tiling window managers, sorry. Ratpoison breaks windows up into non-overlapping tiles, but it doesn't (by default) automatically manage their placement anymore than screen does. Opening up a new terminal (or whatever) covers the previously active one. The WMs I'm talking about automatically place windows into various layouts, such as "master window on one side, other windows stacked vertically on the other side", current window full-screen, current window floating with mouse-drag-based move and resize, etc. In dwm or wmii you can tag windows arbitrarily, and each tag works as a separate workspace. Whenever you switch tags or add/remove a window, the others are repositioned according to the current layout rule. In practice, I often do things like run emacs on its own tag, but also on a tag shared with a pdf or something I'm referencing. Workspace #8 is emacs, #4 is split emacs+pdf+screen, etc. You just specify which windows to group together and it does the rest, usually needing little intervention. You can add this sort of fast grouping behavior to ratpoison via scripting (and the scripting interface for it is pretty good), but it doesn't try to do this by default. Its priority is on avoiding the mouse, rather than avoiding manual window placement in general. The latter indirectly leads to an interface with less mouse use anyway, though, since you seldom spend time clicking to focus on, move, or resize windows except with programs that are too awkward to use in tiles. This has less and less to do with screen, though.