12 ms·

I must be one of the very few "hackerish" minded people that does not really get the appeal of tiling window managers. Even in the early days of Linux I meticul

by anyfoo 5y ago

I must be one of the very few "hackerish" minded people that does not really get the appeal of tiling window managers. Even in the early days of Linux I meticulously arranged my overlapping windows in my X11R5 window manager. For example, there are some terminal windows or similar with running logs (or chats) at some of the edges, partially obscured by other windows who make better use of the space they cover. But those partially covered windows are still showing me what's currently going on at all times (i.e. the last few lines), and I can get their full content at a mouse click/keyboard shortcut press. Then there are partially obscured browser windows. Again the most relevant part of their content remains visible (e.g. for blogs that's usually roughly their "left half", for documentation with a content bar on the left their "right half"), and scrolling them does not require giving them focus. Then there are tiny windows like minimized views of media players that usually neatly fit into some of the open space resulting from my arrangement. And series of windows all similar to each other that are carefully arranged such that a single click reveals any of them, nearly obscuring the rest of the same series, but never hiding any of them completely. It may look "unkempt" at a first glance, but is actually very deliberate. I feel like a tiling environment with its constantly changing layout would be actual chaos... and somehow generally a step backwards. There are some dedicated situations where I tile two windows next to each other, but that's just that: A dedicated situation, often happening on another space/desktop.

xiaomai 5y ago
I'm the same way. I've tried the various tiling WMs over the years. To me the ideal is just letting me manage the windows myself, and then if you give me some keybindings to snap a window into a certain half or quadrant of the screen then life is real good.
- whalesalad 5y ago
  This is all I need. I use an app on macOS called sizeup that let's me do this. I can center a window for reading text on my larger display. Fullscreen a window without using the actual native full screen on macOS. Snap left, snap right, up down etc. It can also keep track of hardware profiles, so windows will restore to their bigger sizes and positions when I plug my laptop into a display. https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/sizeup.png https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/sizeup.png
  - selectodude 5y ago
    Am I the only person left who still uses Expose? I feel like Apple is going to kill it off, they already rolled it into "Mission Control" and removed all the keybindings.
    - jen20 5y ago
      I use it constantly, but usually via the trackpad. I hadn’t actually noticed any key binding changes!
      - trymas 5y ago
        I concur to whole this thread. Have no need for tiling VM especially on macOS. With trackpad gestures I can manage all windows quickly and conveniently (and to be fair I did not know about keyboard shortcuts). Though I use spectacle.app for those rare occasions when I want to snap a window to the left or right.
    - schmorptron 5y ago
      Funny, because that feature seems to be what inspired the entire Gnome 3+ desktop, and it's now wonderfully polished there.
    - tokamak-teapot 5y ago
      I use it and love it. I use three finger swipe up and hadn't ever looked for a keyboard shortcut. It seems to be set to ctrl-uparrow in the 'Mission Control' settings page. Or am I confused about terminology here?
      - tcoff91 5y ago
        There’s mission control which shows all the windows of every app and then there’s expose which shows all the windows of the current app.
    - whalesalad 5y ago
      I really dislike the full screen on macOS. I wish the little green balls would maximize, not full-screen. Even on modern hardware, the transition between spaces is a waste of time and resources. I much prefer immediately switching to an open application.
- hbbio 5y ago
  That's exactly how I feel too! For MacOS, I love Rectangle, which is both great and open source: https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle
  - brimble 5y ago
    Yeah, I'm still on Spectacle, which is basically the same thing. It's all I need as far as tiling-alike stuff goes and is the very first thing I install after Homebrew, on a new Mac. In fact, Homebrew, Spectacle, and using the Settings GUI to set my caps lock to an extra ctrl, is the entirety of my new-Mac setup routine, as far as stuff that never varies. I've tried "real" tiling WMs on Linux and don't really get it. I just need quick and consistent keyboard shortcuts for send-to-quarter, send-to-half, and maximize. That's plenty.
    - dsego 5y ago
      It seems that spectacle is not being actively maintained anymore.
      - brimble 5y ago
        I'll stop doing `brew install spectacle` and look for something else when it stops working :-) M1 Mac, but I'm still on Big Sur. Maybe Monterey breaks it. Guess I'll find out soonish. I'm reluctant to change a piece of software that's never given me so much as a hiccup in years of use, until I have to.
- aspaceman 5y ago
  IMHO it's like your actual desk. Some people like it clean and organized - others have a cluttered mess of objects. My desk is a tragedy, but I much prefer tiling window managers and rigid, well-organized computing environments. Great to see the variety of options provided by KDE. I'll have to give this a try.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- rodgerd 5y ago
  For me, the PowerToys tools are the gold standard here (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzones https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzone...), especially the Canvas mode: remember where I like my applications, and put them there, including whatever peculiar layout that I think is important.
  - cam_l 5y ago
    Agree.. but if only we could stop windows from stealing focus.
    - spockz 5y ago
      Ah well. Stealing focus is happening more and more in macOS. A great annoyance…
      - unicornfinder 5y ago
        Indeed. I switched from macOS to Windows about a year ago now and I have to say I really appreciate how on Windows stealing focus is much, much more rare than it was on macOS. I honestly found it infuriating on my Mac.
        GekkePrutser 5y ago
        I know right? Especially when you've just booted up and half your apps are still realising they've just been opened and screaming for attention. They should just open in the background and only appear when I look for them. I don't understand why they haven't tackled that in 18 macOS versions. Simply launching an app with a flag saying "this is not a user-initiated launch but a reopen, stay back" would fix it. At least bootup is a lot quicker on the latest M1s (privately I use KDE now but for work iIm still on Mac)
        spockz 5y ago
        Apps used to open in the background in macOS. Also OS dialogs would not steal focus iirc, or maybe those modal dialogs dood not exist. Not stealing focus used to be one of the top rules in the Apple human interface guidelines. I’m really not sure what happened.
- oblio 5y ago
  Sooo... Windows? :-D
- aybarshazar 5y ago
  I didn't use any tiling window manager so I don't really know what I'm missing. But I've come up with a system based on my own needs. I use Hammerspoon (https://www.hammerspoon.org/ https://www.hammerspoon.org/) and a few little Lua methods to do the following and it works perfectly: - Resize windows - Position windows around the screen - Instantly jump between apps I frequently use (this is especially good, for example with option+1 I can focus on the browser, with option+2 I can focus on my text editor, no more cmd+tab)
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  This is basically what Windows 11 is doing now. It's a sensible middle ground IMO.
godshatter 5y ago
I was going to say the same thing. I set things up a particular way with an eye to easily clicking on partially hidden windows, and I usually have specific empty areas on each virtual desktop in the same place because you can place the cursor over the background and use the scroll wheel to change virtual desktops. Each desktop has it's own layout, but they all respect that one area is to be blank so I can easily put my mouse there and rotate between the desktops. It's silly, but it's incredibly useful. But everyone is different, which is why I go for configurable over programs that expect you to work a particular way. KDE is very good about this.
zamalek 5y ago
I think it's purely based on you workflow. I'm a "maximizer," 99% of the time things are maximized on my desktop. A second tile (browser) is usually extremely temporary. Other stuff goes to other desktops. So I general, my layout is highly consistent: just one tile. For what it's worth, hiding the unimportant details in a web page can also be accomplished by zoom/scroll - but that's definitely not to say your approach is wrong. Different things for different people.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pjerem 5y ago
  Fellow maximiser here. It’s probably the reason why I still love OSX after all the shitty updates. The full-screen mode is a marvel of ergonomics once you get it. Just maximize your apps and switch between them with the trackpad like they are virtual desktops (because they, in fact, are). It’s an awesome mode for a single screen workflow. Tilings WM are cool but you are rapidly limited with be screen (and even with two).
  - djur 5y ago
    My main gripe with the macOS fullscreen mode is that there's no way to force the non-fullscreen desktop to stay in one place. If something in a fullscreen app pulls up the desktop (for instance, running an installer you just downloaded), the desktop gets moved to the next position. I want to force it to stay in one place (or, ideally, have a gesture or hotkey to switch between my fullscreen windows and the desktop). I could do this with most of the tiled WMs I've used.
    - slimsag 5y ago
      Oh my god, this, this, this! I've basically trained myself not to click links anywhere, because I know the macOS window manager will f* up my virtual desktop order and I'll have to fix it.
    - spockz 5y ago
eikenberry 5y ago
I think it is people who use their laptop display exclusively (or nearly so). On small laptop displays tiling windows is nice and helps maximize the use of the display. I use the tiling features of mine WM a lot more when using my laptop display, but I still very much prefer 'floating' windows when using a large, external monitor.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- indymike 5y ago
  I use an abnormally large ultrawide monitor, and find khronkite (another KDE tiling script) to be very useful. The three column layout works particularly well on the ultrawide, while the standard tiling layout works great on the laptop's built in screen. There is a little tiny hack to enable settings on the krohnkite github page: https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite
christophilus 5y ago
I’m the same. Neovim fills the center of my screen. The web application I’m working on sits behind it, with enough exposed that I can see if my changes are working / breaking, and with another terminal partially revealed showing any build errors. Works well for me. I never liked the layout that WMs picked, because they always force me to look to one side or the other (on a 4K and 5k monitor). Maybe if I was solely running on a 13 inch laptop, a tiling WM would make sense.
- JNRowe 5y ago
  Many tiling WMs support this type of layout; magnifier in awesomewm, centeredmaster in dwm, etc. The difference compared to manually performing the task being that you can cycle the arrangement through various states without extra effort or losing the previous configuration. Of course, you can also just choose to float individual windows across background tiles in practically all tiling window managers too. I guess it depends a lot on whether the neovim use is an exception, or a layout style you use for other projects too.
  - Macha 5y ago
    It's not built in, but you could configure such a layout in i3 too (and I guess sway, since it's intended to be a clone?): https://i3wm.org/docs/layout-saving.html https://i3wm.org/docs/layout-saving.html Bit of first time setup but then you can just bind it to a hotkey after that.
  - christophilus 5y ago
    My experience with those was that they’d crunch the window down to a small rectangle which was hardly useful. I like having the browser and terminal be a reasonable size, even if hidden. Especially the browser; as I’m rarely testing mobile layouts when making changes.
    - JNRowe 5y ago
      The sizes are configurable, for example by setting mwfact in awesomewm via the config or dynamically with keys.
karmakaze 5y ago
I think it's related to the way people organize. I also like to have edges (maybe a few log lines) and corners of windows peeking alongside the edges that are small reminders of their existence. What others consider 'clutter' is 'context' to me. My physical desk area looks much the same--but worse with different layers for other projects. What I really don't like is the swipe-the-entire-full-screen to an entirely new context when working on another part of the same thing.
LAC-Tech 5y ago
I think my ideal WM would me split the screen up regions, then I populate the regions with a bunch of apps. Where as in tiling WMs all your windows need to be visible.
- uberduper 5y ago
  This is basically what you get from pygrid (or Spectacle / Rectangle on a mac). I use a slightly modified pygrid to do all my window sizing and placement.
- djur 5y ago
  A lot of tiling window managers also support tabbing or stacking of windows within tiles. That's always how I used ion and wmii, off the top of my head.
- yes_but_no 5y ago
  I think herbsluftwm[0] fits better to this description than the other tiling wms, with its frame and virtual monitor features. [0]https://herbstluftwm.org/ https://herbstluftwm.org/
rawtxapp 5y ago
I think once you get used to a tiling window manager, like force yourself to use it for over a couple weeks, it's very difficult to go back. Somewhat similar to vim. Personally, I have 2-3 external 32" 4k monitors and I want to maximize the real estate that's used, tiling wm (specifically i3 in this case) makes it very easy to move windows around, to switch between different screens, to move screens between different monitors quickly. Dragging a mouse across that relatively high screen real estate is a huge pita without i3.
- hibbelig 5y ago
  I used to love tiling. But then I started to use apps that needed more than half of the screen: web browser, IDE. Now I put my IDE full screen and the browser about the top right 70% of the screen so that the console output in the IDE peeks out below the browser so that I can see what output is generated when I use the app I’m developing in the browser.
markstos 5y ago
Sway supports both tiling and floating windows and you can define the rules and defaults as you wish. For example a browser window tiled with an editor and a media player floating on top. You could have one virtual desktop that defaults to tiling and another to floating. With a keyboard shortcut you can toggle a window between the two states. I was aware of tiling window managers for a decade before I switched from Gnome to Sway. Now I don’t want to go back. Tiling may seem chaotic, but with Sway you are in the driver’s seat, deciding where each window goes and whether it’s floating or not. There is also interactive window resizing with the mouse and as well as moving windows with the mouse via drag and drop.
- aorth 5y ago
  > Sway Sway also supports a tabbed layout! I'm a full-time window maximizer (as are sibling commenters). I keep all windows fully maximized and organized on virtual desktops: web and music on 1, terminals on 2, email and office on 3, etc. Love it! Windows being fully maximized was something I learned to like from GNOME 3 when it came out a decade ago. I used Openbox, Fluxbox, GNOME and others for years and I would never go back. Never KDE though. Too messy...
- MayeulC 5y ago
  As someone who switched from KDE in ~2017 mainly to try wayland, and stayed for the configurability and tiling aspect... Is there a way to make KDE ingest my sway configuration? I would get the best of both worlds this way. Bonus points if the resulting config is compatible with both! I'm pretty sure kwin's window rules support everything you can express in a sway configuration.
  - ubercow13 5y ago
    > I'm pretty sure kwin's window rules support everything you can express in a sway configuration That seems very unlikely
thawaya3113 5y ago
There’s nothing there a tiling WM cannot do. I have only tried i3 so I can speak only about that. But I’d assume most others are similar. 1) Tiling WMs make Workspaces incredibly easy to access. Super + # is usually enough to get you to a specific workspace and you can easily have 10 of those. So if you are monitoring stuff constantly, it’s easy enough to tile them all in a workspace and gain almost immediate access and come right back to your primary workflow without disrupting much. 2) If you want constant visibility to a small section of a webpage, for example, you can trivially tile it and resize it to be extremely narrow/high on your current workspace, and scroll to ensure the party you want to be visible is visible. And you can do all of this with a keyboard probably a lot faster than you can with a mouse. And the tiling WM ensures you’re using up all the space in the screen without you doing anything (as you make the “background” window smaller, the “foreground” window grows). 3) Finally, you can always pop out 1 or more floating windows as well.
nsonha 5y ago
no you are not the only one. Don't even get me started on binary space partitioning, don't these people even stop for a moment and think what the point is.
stormbrew 5y ago
Everything you're describing in this reply just exhausts the hell out of my brain. You're describing an incredibly large amount of cognitive load you hold in your head all the time about where things are and what they mean and how much of them are visible. Tiling WM are largely about just not thinking that much about windows at all. They're visible or they're not, they occupy precise areas on your screen, and moving them around is easy and simple and they don't scatter to the 4 winds when you plug your laptop into an external monitor and then unplug it again. Every time I have to go use a computer with overlapping windows I suddenly find myself thinking about where things are about 10 times as much and it's frustrating and tiring.
- djur 5y ago
  Right, for me the default in a tiling WM has always been one fullscreen pane, which I can split on those occasional situations where I want to see more than one window at a time. Exactly the same as how I use screen or vim (which I use splits in far more often than my WM). If I'm not using a window right now I don't need or want to see it.
- Joeri 5y ago
  Your comment and the comment it is a reply to remind me of the post-show part of the classic ATP episode “The Windows of Siracusa County” where John Siracusa explains his approach to windowing, to the absolute dismay of his cohosts because of the seemingly insane amount of complexity. https://atp.fm/96 https://atp.fm/96 (at 1:29:30)
- bayindirh 5y ago
  KDE has two solutions to these problems: Present windows and desktop grid view. Present windows also has a search feature, so you press a key combination, present windows open. Two or three letters for the title of the window, then enter. If you want to fast organization, showing all windows and desktop is also achievable. Open the view, drag and drop windows or desktops. For me, both views have their active corners and keyboard shortcuts. People give me sideways looks when I use both of them.
  - 5y ago
mackrevinack 5y ago
for me, a good in-between is using the "super + left click & drag" to move windows around and "super + right click and drag" to resize a window. they allow you to move or resize when you cursor is anywhere in the current window instead of only at the edges. it makes it really quick to perform and can be done it of the corner of you eye. setting a window to always-on-top with a hotkey is another useful one
YaBomm 5y ago
lostmsu 5y ago
Disclaimer: I am the author. For Windows 10+ I made Stack WM: https://losttech.software/stack.html https://losttech.software/stack.html I works differently from i3: you predefine screen zones (possibly overlapping), and then just move your windows between them with keyboard shortcuts or middle mouse button. IMHO, covers the problems you mentioned. You can have: - multiple windows in one zone with normal Z ordering - an improvised taskbar for any zone or a group of zones - zones that stack windows vertically or horizontally or tile them in a fixed grid - zones that dynamically adjust size depending on contents - windows of certain app opening directly into a certain zone - floating windows - widgets (the easiest one is simply showing text from a URL with XQuery or JSON parser) - customize the hell out of it with WPF It is now one of a few things holding me back on Windows: until I have it or something else very similar running on Linux, I have no replacement to manage my 3 screens the way I like it.
- oblio 5y ago
  This looks really cool!
rawoke083600 5y ago
> really get the appeal of tiling window managers. There might be "levels" of appeal and value... I too a few years ago moved to i3. The "tiling" nature is not where I got the most value from. I got it from have "multiple dedicated virtual workspaces(vdesktops)". With the ability to switch to them fast. Example: 1) Terminal 2) Browser 3) Browser-2 4) Code (VStudio) 5) Code-2 (VStudio) 6) Files (File manager) 7) Gimp 8) Geany (Text Editor) 9) Empty 10)Empty Just "knowing" how to "instantly" go from Code to a Browser or Text Editor has giving me A LOT of productivity. I'd say more so than any "tiling feature"
- christophilus 5y ago
  I do this with Gnome.
qwertox 5y ago
My issue is mostly with the half-screen vertical split (two side by side panes). Half a monitor is not enough for me to feel comfortable in an editor, so I'd split it 2/3 or even 3/4, but the remaining 1/3 or 1/4 are not wide enough to hold let's say terminals, and using a horizontal split to get the full width for terminals also steals a lot of height from the editor, while full width in terminals is usually not desired, it's between 1/2 and full width what my terminals should be. So I prefer to alt-tab cycle. Even though I know that this is an extra effort, at least I can size the windows so that they contain the optimal amount of information. I do use tools which help me with sizing and positioning of windows.
- Macha 5y ago
  I certainly have this problem with 1080p (or 4k at 2x, which is similar in screen area to content ratio at the same monitor size). But for me I don't have the same problem at 1440p (and I guess if I had one, 5k at 2x). When I was younger I used to turn the font size way down to make two across work in 900p, but these days I stick to more comfortable font sizes.
- mkesper 5y ago
  You need a bigger monitor with higher resolution. Found that much easier than any two monitor setup or even monitor and laptop display.
DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
interesting how people are so different in what makes them productive. Your setup sounds like an organized chaos. Like my living room which has things cluttered here or there but is not actually filthy. But when it comes to my WM and technology in general I am so swamped by information that it's an ongoing struggle not having my attention hijacked. Most of the time I'm in a single full-screen window unless I need to context switch. Some exceptions would be working on a pdf where the markdown is edited in one window and the pdf is to the right (auto-reloading when I save the markdown). Other exceptions are running a terminal right next to my browser because I need to enter a few commands (installation instructions etc). I used dwm, switched to i3 then stuck with sway. What I love about it is my limited screen real-estate (laptop) isn't wasted. I don't have an external monitor because I move a lot. My colleagues can't imagine working productively just on a laptop. It's perfect for me.
hnlmorg 5y ago
It's not just you. I'd written my own Bash replacement shell and use it daily so I'm not some Linux n00b and I've never got on with tiling VMs. I started to think that maybe the issue is just that I don't like existing tiling WMs, so I started to write my own. After about 2 days of coding I realized that the issue wasn't that other tiling WMs suck, the issue was me: I just prefer floating windows which I can snap via drag and dropping when I want tiling. In fact Kwin is already my perfect WM. I had seen all these screenshots and work colleagues using i3, Awesome, dwm and such like and looking ultra cool (from a nerdy point of view) and fooled myself into thinking this is what I should be doing too without realizing that I was already happy and productive without them.
KronisLV 5y ago
Heh, i feel like maybe hardware constraints also play a role here. For example, right now i have 4 1080p monitors connected to my computer. I've never really needed anything more than the ability to snap windows to either side of the monitors (or bottom/top for vertical ones) or make them full screen. With a higher resolution monitor (or an ultra widescreen one) i suspect that it would rapidly change and i'd need to look into either more advanced snapping setups (e.g. AquaSnap or PowerToys FancyZones on Windows, or the Linux equivalent, though even XFCE is pretty flexible out of the box there). That said, on a laptop i probably wouldn't even try doing that and in many cases the software where i would actually want some sort of tiling already has it baked in - SSH clients like MobaXTerm (though Remmina is also nice on *nix) or all of JetBrains products. Tiling OS windows with smaller sizes feels rather inefficient, because many OSes out there waste space immensely with menus and other always visible items. But hey, i'd argue that my current setup only has manageable cognitive load because i use overlapping windows managers as "optionally tileable" and due to the amount of monitors have a maximum of 8 open windows without any overlapping. Someone might achieve the same with a single (albeit larger) monitor and a proper tiling manager.
falsaberN1 5y ago
I must be one of the few that doesn't favor tiling as well. Kinda. My setup is unusual. Allow me two paragraphs to describe it and then why tiling wouldn't work for me. I usually have 3 windows open at a given time, either a terminal/IM/notes program at the bottom right corner, vlc/deadbeef/copyq/scrcpy at the top right corner, and everything else is the main program I'm working with (2/3rds of the screen width, 100% of height, so stuff like Firefox, Krusader, vscode, Godot, Blender/Krita/GIMP/Inkscape, Audacity, qemu/Virtualbox, etc). I use 3 hotkeys to put a window into one of those 3 spots, via wmctrl, everything else is floating. If things get messy (like if I need a few virtual machines and seeing their contents all at once) I use virtual desktops. I also assigned hotkeys that either open or focus specific programs (like meta+X to focus Konsole or launch it if it doesn't exist, meta+E for Krusader...) so I can quickly switch to them even if they are at the bottom of the stack or aren't opened yet. Got all sorts of custom launchers, clipboard processing and a lot more functions available to key combinations I can do with my left hand only (it's the "alt+tab" hand so I extended it to all important shortcuts). The layout is a standard Windows style bottom panel (Used to have an Unity-style left sidebar but that gave me whiplash when using other computers) full of info/alert plasmoids, including custom ones. All support scripts are fairly universal and mostly work in other desktops, but KDE has nice configuration options to automate window settings, so it works better with it. Also got custom themes but I have no idea how to port them out of KDE. So KDE it is. Anyway with the description out of the way, tiling might work fine if all you work with is terminals, a browser and other text sources, but for that I'd rather just have tmux managing the important stuff and extra Konsole tabs for the minor operations (or to passively display output of updates in a new self-destructing tab so it gets rid of itself if I forget to close after seeing the output). Because I work with many visual tools that need plenty of space (and don't like sudden resizing) the tiling workflow just can't work for me, anyway. I can see why some would prefer it, though. As I said my use case is unusual. (Yeah I know artists would rather use Windows or Macs but my job requires Linux. My creative things are a hobby, but I wanted to have my cake and eat it. KDE has enough flexibility to let me hack it into submission, so it's not bad at all.)
Saint_Genet 5y ago
TBH, it feels like so many "hackerish" people spend so muck time dinking around with their environment they don't get much else done. I used to be that way too when I first started using Linux back in the 90s, but nowadays I mostly run with whatever the defaults are and concentrate on my work.
tokamak-teapot 5y ago
I sometimes keep 2 or three windows 'tiled' on a 34" monitor, but on anything smaller I tend to use 1 or perhaps 2 windows (like you, often with some overlap). Perhaps eyesight is important here? I'm short sighted but find wearing glasses when reading a monitor gives me eye strain, so just keep a distance from my monitor where I can read without my glasses (about 1m). To tile windows in a way that is useful I'd need to have much smaller fonts, and I wouldn't be able to read.
jraph 5y ago
> I must be one of the very few "hackerish" minded people that does not really get the appeal of tiling window managers Are we very few, or just non vocal? I maximize the windows I work on. When I need to see two things on a screen, my window manager's ability to place windows side by side using the mouse or keyboard shortcuts is more than enough. I usually disable compositing to make shadows disappear when I do this, they are distracting. Kwin (like more window managers I think) can place windows side by side (left - right or top - bottom), or one window on each corner of the screen. I can't imagine needing to see more than 4 windows at the same time. Seeing three / four windows is already more than distracting enough for me. My brain is too small for that. They wouldn't hold enough information anyway since I zoom text quite a bit, so I can be far from my screen and watch it for long hours without tiring my eyes. When I notice colleagues tiling their terminal sessions with Terminator I feel claustrophobic. Konsole offers this now, but I've been sticking with tabs so far.
- lewispollard 5y ago
  > I can't imagine needing to see more than 4 windows at the same time. Seeing three / four windows is already more than distracting enough for me. KDE + bismuth user, with dual screens. Terminal, IDE, window for the application I'm working on, browser for the documentation of the framework or tool I'm using. Sometimes an extra browser window for miscellaneous searching. Sometimes MS Teams is in the mix there too. Oh and as you mentioned, terminal is usually tmuxed into 2 or more panes. And if I do need to focus down to one maximised window, meta+m to toggle "monocle" layout which maximises and removes borders. But, I have ADHD and find that if something isn't visible in front of me, it's basically non-existent from the point of view of my working memory.
nvarsj 5y ago
I can sort of see what you’re saying, but the cognitive management of what you describe sounds like a huge pain. I use PaperWM and it’s awesome. It just gets out of my way and let’s me manage tons of apps and windows with ease and 0 manual window management. The sliding window tiling approach is also much better imo than that of i3 style, especially on large/widescreen monitors. As an aside, it’s interesting to me that it’s predominantly OS X users that “don’t see the point in tiling WMs”.
blindstitch 5y ago
I half agree. I used the tiling window manager i3 for about a year, then gnome for the past two years. I really do like to move windows around and arrange them, it feels sort of tactile. I like the simple extensibility of i3 - even as a novice programmer it was possible for me to add new features and even build my own custom python bindings to add more nuanced controls. After a while i3 did become a sort of second brain and it felt like I could keep various domains of life separate very effectively when I was going to school reading and writing a lot, working part time at a job that required lots of terminal windows, and doing my leisure computing all on the same machine. Life has changed and I no longer have a need for balancing all that stuff at once and my window management needs are simpler, a handful of browser windows mostly. When things get complex gnome is only about 50% as good as I need it to be to manage many things going on at once, though. Alt-tab application switching is a trash paradigm that is terrible no matter the OS.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
I think tiling is better, but to each their own. And tiling WMs don't mean everything is constantly changing. I think you have a good point about the sidebars of webpages. A lot of webpages don't cope very well with being put in a narrow window like documentation beside a code editor. A lot of cruft, padding, menubars etc tend to take up unmoveable space. It would be nice if we could pan and zoom that kind of stuff out of the way. But I personally use something in the middle. I have 9 virtual desktops (mapped directly to the numpad on my keyboard using KDE's shortcuts) with some static tiled configurations of the apps I use daily. This way I can quickly check an IM that comes in and snap back to my work stuff in an instant. But like I said, whatever works for you! I don't think it's a matter of one size fits all. The only thing I really miss about KDE is having virtual desktops switchable per monitor, not as a whole set of all monitors together :(

by anyfoo 5y ago

xiaomai 5y ago

I'm the same way. I've tried the various tiling WMs over the years. To me the ideal is just letting me manage the windows myself, and then if you give me some keybindings to snap a window into a certain half or quadrant of the screen then life is real good.

whalesalad 5y ago
This is all I need. I use an app on macOS called sizeup that let's me do this. I can center a window for reading text on my larger display. Fullscreen a window without using the actual native full screen on macOS. Snap left, snap right, up down etc. It can also keep track of hardware profiles, so windows will restore to their bigger sizes and positions when I plug my laptop into a display. https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/sizeup.png https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/sizeup.png
- selectodude 5y ago
  Am I the only person left who still uses Expose? I feel like Apple is going to kill it off, they already rolled it into "Mission Control" and removed all the keybindings.
  - jen20 5y ago
    I use it constantly, but usually via the trackpad. I hadn’t actually noticed any key binding changes!
    - trymas 5y ago
      I concur to whole this thread. Have no need for tiling VM especially on macOS. With trackpad gestures I can manage all windows quickly and conveniently (and to be fair I did not know about keyboard shortcuts). Though I use spectacle.app for those rare occasions when I want to snap a window to the left or right.
  - schmorptron 5y ago
    Funny, because that feature seems to be what inspired the entire Gnome 3+ desktop, and it's now wonderfully polished there.
  - tokamak-teapot 5y ago
    I use it and love it. I use three finger swipe up and hadn't ever looked for a keyboard shortcut. It seems to be set to ctrl-uparrow in the 'Mission Control' settings page. Or am I confused about terminology here?
    - tcoff91 5y ago
      There’s mission control which shows all the windows of every app and then there’s expose which shows all the windows of the current app.
  - whalesalad 5y ago
    I really dislike the full screen on macOS. I wish the little green balls would maximize, not full-screen. Even on modern hardware, the transition between spaces is a waste of time and resources. I much prefer immediately switching to an open application.
hbbio 5y ago
That's exactly how I feel too! For MacOS, I love Rectangle, which is both great and open source: https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle
- brimble 5y ago
  Yeah, I'm still on Spectacle, which is basically the same thing. It's all I need as far as tiling-alike stuff goes and is the very first thing I install after Homebrew, on a new Mac. In fact, Homebrew, Spectacle, and using the Settings GUI to set my caps lock to an extra ctrl, is the entirety of my new-Mac setup routine, as far as stuff that never varies. I've tried "real" tiling WMs on Linux and don't really get it. I just need quick and consistent keyboard shortcuts for send-to-quarter, send-to-half, and maximize. That's plenty.
  - dsego 5y ago
    It seems that spectacle is not being actively maintained anymore.
    - brimble 5y ago
      I'll stop doing `brew install spectacle` and look for something else when it stops working :-) M1 Mac, but I'm still on Big Sur. Maybe Monterey breaks it. Guess I'll find out soonish. I'm reluctant to change a piece of software that's never given me so much as a hiccup in years of use, until I have to.
aspaceman 5y ago
IMHO it's like your actual desk. Some people like it clean and organized - others have a cluttered mess of objects. My desk is a tragedy, but I much prefer tiling window managers and rigid, well-organized computing environments. Great to see the variety of options provided by KDE. I'll have to give this a try.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
rodgerd 5y ago
For me, the PowerToys tools are the gold standard here (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzones https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzone...), especially the Canvas mode: remember where I like my applications, and put them there, including whatever peculiar layout that I think is important.
- cam_l 5y ago
  Agree.. but if only we could stop windows from stealing focus.
  - spockz 5y ago
    Ah well. Stealing focus is happening more and more in macOS. A great annoyance…
    - unicornfinder 5y ago
      Indeed. I switched from macOS to Windows about a year ago now and I have to say I really appreciate how on Windows stealing focus is much, much more rare than it was on macOS. I honestly found it infuriating on my Mac.
      - GekkePrutser 5y ago
        I know right? Especially when you've just booted up and half your apps are still realising they've just been opened and screaming for attention. They should just open in the background and only appear when I look for them. I don't understand why they haven't tackled that in 18 macOS versions. Simply launching an app with a flag saying "this is not a user-initiated launch but a reopen, stay back" would fix it. At least bootup is a lot quicker on the latest M1s (privately I use KDE now but for work iIm still on Mac)
        spockz 5y ago
        Apps used to open in the background in macOS. Also OS dialogs would not steal focus iirc, or maybe those modal dialogs dood not exist. Not stealing focus used to be one of the top rules in the Apple human interface guidelines. I’m really not sure what happened.
oblio 5y ago
Sooo... Windows? :-D
aybarshazar 5y ago
I didn't use any tiling window manager so I don't really know what I'm missing. But I've come up with a system based on my own needs. I use Hammerspoon (https://www.hammerspoon.org/ https://www.hammerspoon.org/) and a few little Lua methods to do the following and it works perfectly: - Resize windows - Position windows around the screen - Instantly jump between apps I frequently use (this is especially good, for example with option+1 I can focus on the browser, with option+2 I can focus on my text editor, no more cmd+tab)
GekkePrutser 5y ago
This is basically what Windows 11 is doing now. It's a sensible middle ground IMO.

godshatter 5y ago

I was going to say the same thing. I set things up a particular way with an eye to easily clicking on partially hidden windows, and I usually have specific empty areas on each virtual desktop in the same place because you can place the cursor over the background and use the scroll wheel to change virtual desktops. Each desktop has it's own layout, but they all respect that one area is to be blank so I can easily put my mouse there and rotate between the desktops. It's silly, but it's incredibly useful. But everyone is different, which is why I go for configurable over programs that expect you to work a particular way. KDE is very good about this.

zamalek 5y ago

I think it's purely based on you workflow. I'm a "maximizer," 99% of the time things are maximized on my desktop. A second tile (browser) is usually extremely temporary. Other stuff goes to other desktops. So I general, my layout is highly consistent: just one tile. For what it's worth, hiding the unimportant details in a web page can also be accomplished by zoom/scroll - but that's definitely not to say your approach is wrong. Different things for different people.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pjerem 5y ago
Fellow maximiser here. It’s probably the reason why I still love OSX after all the shitty updates. The full-screen mode is a marvel of ergonomics once you get it. Just maximize your apps and switch between them with the trackpad like they are virtual desktops (because they, in fact, are). It’s an awesome mode for a single screen workflow. Tilings WM are cool but you are rapidly limited with be screen (and even with two).
- djur 5y ago
  My main gripe with the macOS fullscreen mode is that there's no way to force the non-fullscreen desktop to stay in one place. If something in a fullscreen app pulls up the desktop (for instance, running an installer you just downloaded), the desktop gets moved to the next position. I want to force it to stay in one place (or, ideally, have a gesture or hotkey to switch between my fullscreen windows and the desktop). I could do this with most of the tiled WMs I've used.
  - slimsag 5y ago
    Oh my god, this, this, this! I've basically trained myself not to click links anywhere, because I know the macOS window manager will f* up my virtual desktop order and I'll have to fix it.
  - spockz 5y ago

eikenberry 5y ago

I think it is people who use their laptop display exclusively (or nearly so). On small laptop displays tiling windows is nice and helps maximize the use of the display. I use the tiling features of mine WM a lot more when using my laptop display, but I still very much prefer 'floating' windows when using a large, external monitor.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
indymike 5y ago
I use an abnormally large ultrawide monitor, and find khronkite (another KDE tiling script) to be very useful. The three column layout works particularly well on the ultrawide, while the standard tiling layout works great on the laptop's built in screen. There is a little tiny hack to enable settings on the krohnkite github page: https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite

christophilus 5y ago

I’m the same. Neovim fills the center of my screen. The web application I’m working on sits behind it, with enough exposed that I can see if my changes are working / breaking, and with another terminal partially revealed showing any build errors. Works well for me. I never liked the layout that WMs picked, because they always force me to look to one side or the other (on a 4K and 5k monitor). Maybe if I was solely running on a 13 inch laptop, a tiling WM would make sense.

JNRowe 5y ago
Many tiling WMs support this type of layout; magnifier in awesomewm, centeredmaster in dwm, etc. The difference compared to manually performing the task being that you can cycle the arrangement through various states without extra effort or losing the previous configuration. Of course, you can also just choose to float individual windows across background tiles in practically all tiling window managers too. I guess it depends a lot on whether the neovim use is an exception, or a layout style you use for other projects too.
- Macha 5y ago
  It's not built in, but you could configure such a layout in i3 too (and I guess sway, since it's intended to be a clone?): https://i3wm.org/docs/layout-saving.html https://i3wm.org/docs/layout-saving.html Bit of first time setup but then you can just bind it to a hotkey after that.
- christophilus 5y ago
  My experience with those was that they’d crunch the window down to a small rectangle which was hardly useful. I like having the browser and terminal be a reasonable size, even if hidden. Especially the browser; as I’m rarely testing mobile layouts when making changes.
  - JNRowe 5y ago
    The sizes are configurable, for example by setting mwfact in awesomewm via the config or dynamically with keys.

karmakaze 5y ago

I think it's related to the way people organize. I also like to have edges (maybe a few log lines) and corners of windows peeking alongside the edges that are small reminders of their existence. What others consider 'clutter' is 'context' to me. My physical desk area looks much the same--but worse with different layers for other projects. What I really don't like is the swipe-the-entire-full-screen to an entirely new context when working on another part of the same thing.

LAC-Tech 5y ago

I think my ideal WM would me split the screen up regions, then I populate the regions with a bunch of apps. Where as in tiling WMs all your windows need to be visible.

uberduper 5y ago
This is basically what you get from pygrid (or Spectacle / Rectangle on a mac). I use a slightly modified pygrid to do all my window sizing and placement.
djur 5y ago
A lot of tiling window managers also support tabbing or stacking of windows within tiles. That's always how I used ion and wmii, off the top of my head.
yes_but_no 5y ago
I think herbsluftwm[0] fits better to this description than the other tiling wms, with its frame and virtual monitor features. [0]https://herbstluftwm.org/ https://herbstluftwm.org/

rawtxapp 5y ago

I think once you get used to a tiling window manager, like force yourself to use it for over a couple weeks, it's very difficult to go back. Somewhat similar to vim. Personally, I have 2-3 external 32" 4k monitors and I want to maximize the real estate that's used, tiling wm (specifically i3 in this case) makes it very easy to move windows around, to switch between different screens, to move screens between different monitors quickly. Dragging a mouse across that relatively high screen real estate is a huge pita without i3.

hibbelig 5y ago
I used to love tiling. But then I started to use apps that needed more than half of the screen: web browser, IDE. Now I put my IDE full screen and the browser about the top right 70% of the screen so that the console output in the IDE peeks out below the browser so that I can see what output is generated when I use the app I’m developing in the browser.

markstos 5y ago

Sway supports both tiling and floating windows and you can define the rules and defaults as you wish. For example a browser window tiled with an editor and a media player floating on top. You could have one virtual desktop that defaults to tiling and another to floating. With a keyboard shortcut you can toggle a window between the two states. I was aware of tiling window managers for a decade before I switched from Gnome to Sway. Now I don’t want to go back. Tiling may seem chaotic, but with Sway you are in the driver’s seat, deciding where each window goes and whether it’s floating or not. There is also interactive window resizing with the mouse and as well as moving windows with the mouse via drag and drop.

aorth 5y ago
> Sway Sway also supports a tabbed layout! I'm a full-time window maximizer (as are sibling commenters). I keep all windows fully maximized and organized on virtual desktops: web and music on 1, terminals on 2, email and office on 3, etc. Love it! Windows being fully maximized was something I learned to like from GNOME 3 when it came out a decade ago. I used Openbox, Fluxbox, GNOME and others for years and I would never go back. Never KDE though. Too messy...
MayeulC 5y ago
As someone who switched from KDE in ~2017 mainly to try wayland, and stayed for the configurability and tiling aspect... Is there a way to make KDE ingest my sway configuration? I would get the best of both worlds this way. Bonus points if the resulting config is compatible with both! I'm pretty sure kwin's window rules support everything you can express in a sway configuration.
- ubercow13 5y ago
  > I'm pretty sure kwin's window rules support everything you can express in a sway configuration That seems very unlikely

thawaya3113 5y ago

There’s nothing there a tiling WM cannot do. I have only tried i3 so I can speak only about that. But I’d assume most others are similar. 1) Tiling WMs make Workspaces incredibly easy to access. Super + # is usually enough to get you to a specific workspace and you can easily have 10 of those. So if you are monitoring stuff constantly, it’s easy enough to tile them all in a workspace and gain almost immediate access and come right back to your primary workflow without disrupting much. 2) If you want constant visibility to a small section of a webpage, for example, you can trivially tile it and resize it to be extremely narrow/high on your current workspace, and scroll to ensure the party you want to be visible is visible. And you can do all of this with a keyboard probably a lot faster than you can with a mouse. And the tiling WM ensures you’re using up all the space in the screen without you doing anything (as you make the “background” window smaller, the “foreground” window grows). 3) Finally, you can always pop out 1 or more floating windows as well.

nsonha 5y ago

no you are not the only one. Don't even get me started on binary space partitioning, don't these people even stop for a moment and think what the point is.

stormbrew 5y ago

Everything you're describing in this reply just exhausts the hell out of my brain. You're describing an incredibly large amount of cognitive load you hold in your head all the time about where things are and what they mean and how much of them are visible. Tiling WM are largely about just not thinking that much about windows at all. They're visible or they're not, they occupy precise areas on your screen, and moving them around is easy and simple and they don't scatter to the 4 winds when you plug your laptop into an external monitor and then unplug it again. Every time I have to go use a computer with overlapping windows I suddenly find myself thinking about where things are about 10 times as much and it's frustrating and tiring.

djur 5y ago
Right, for me the default in a tiling WM has always been one fullscreen pane, which I can split on those occasional situations where I want to see more than one window at a time. Exactly the same as how I use screen or vim (which I use splits in far more often than my WM). If I'm not using a window right now I don't need or want to see it.
Joeri 5y ago
Your comment and the comment it is a reply to remind me of the post-show part of the classic ATP episode “The Windows of Siracusa County” where John Siracusa explains his approach to windowing, to the absolute dismay of his cohosts because of the seemingly insane amount of complexity. https://atp.fm/96 https://atp.fm/96 (at 1:29:30)
bayindirh 5y ago
KDE has two solutions to these problems: Present windows and desktop grid view. Present windows also has a search feature, so you press a key combination, present windows open. Two or three letters for the title of the window, then enter. If you want to fast organization, showing all windows and desktop is also achievable. Open the view, drag and drop windows or desktops. For me, both views have their active corners and keyboard shortcuts. People give me sideways looks when I use both of them.
- 5y ago

mackrevinack 5y ago

for me, a good in-between is using the "super + left click & drag" to move windows around and "super + right click and drag" to resize a window. they allow you to move or resize when you cursor is anywhere in the current window instead of only at the edges. it makes it really quick to perform and can be done it of the corner of you eye. setting a window to always-on-top with a hotkey is another useful one

YaBomm 5y ago

lostmsu 5y ago

Disclaimer: I am the author. For Windows 10+ I made Stack WM: https://losttech.software/stack.html https://losttech.software/stack.html I works differently from i3: you predefine screen zones (possibly overlapping), and then just move your windows between them with keyboard shortcuts or middle mouse button. IMHO, covers the problems you mentioned. You can have: - multiple windows in one zone with normal Z ordering - an improvised taskbar for any zone or a group of zones - zones that stack windows vertically or horizontally or tile them in a fixed grid - zones that dynamically adjust size depending on contents - windows of certain app opening directly into a certain zone - floating windows - widgets (the easiest one is simply showing text from a URL with XQuery or JSON parser) - customize the hell out of it with WPF It is now one of a few things holding me back on Windows: until I have it or something else very similar running on Linux, I have no replacement to manage my 3 screens the way I like it.

oblio 5y ago
This looks really cool!

rawoke083600 5y ago

> really get the appeal of tiling window managers. There might be "levels" of appeal and value... I too a few years ago moved to i3. The "tiling" nature is not where I got the most value from. I got it from have "multiple dedicated virtual workspaces(vdesktops)". With the ability to switch to them fast. Example: 1) Terminal 2) Browser 3) Browser-2 4) Code (VStudio) 5) Code-2 (VStudio) 6) Files (File manager) 7) Gimp 8) Geany (Text Editor) 9) Empty 10)Empty Just "knowing" how to "instantly" go from Code to a Browser or Text Editor has giving me A LOT of productivity. I'd say more so than any "tiling feature"

christophilus 5y ago
I do this with Gnome.

qwertox 5y ago

My issue is mostly with the half-screen vertical split (two side by side panes). Half a monitor is not enough for me to feel comfortable in an editor, so I'd split it 2/3 or even 3/4, but the remaining 1/3 or 1/4 are not wide enough to hold let's say terminals, and using a horizontal split to get the full width for terminals also steals a lot of height from the editor, while full width in terminals is usually not desired, it's between 1/2 and full width what my terminals should be. So I prefer to alt-tab cycle. Even though I know that this is an extra effort, at least I can size the windows so that they contain the optimal amount of information. I do use tools which help me with sizing and positioning of windows.

Macha 5y ago
I certainly have this problem with 1080p (or 4k at 2x, which is similar in screen area to content ratio at the same monitor size). But for me I don't have the same problem at 1440p (and I guess if I had one, 5k at 2x). When I was younger I used to turn the font size way down to make two across work in 900p, but these days I stick to more comfortable font sizes.
mkesper 5y ago
You need a bigger monitor with higher resolution. Found that much easier than any two monitor setup or even monitor and laptop display.

DyslexicAtheist 5y ago

interesting how people are so different in what makes them productive. Your setup sounds like an organized chaos. Like my living room which has things cluttered here or there but is not actually filthy. But when it comes to my WM and technology in general I am so swamped by information that it's an ongoing struggle not having my attention hijacked. Most of the time I'm in a single full-screen window unless I need to context switch. Some exceptions would be working on a pdf where the markdown is edited in one window and the pdf is to the right (auto-reloading when I save the markdown). Other exceptions are running a terminal right next to my browser because I need to enter a few commands (installation instructions etc). I used dwm, switched to i3 then stuck with sway. What I love about it is my limited screen real-estate (laptop) isn't wasted. I don't have an external monitor because I move a lot. My colleagues can't imagine working productively just on a laptop. It's perfect for me.

hnlmorg 5y ago

It's not just you. I'd written my own Bash replacement shell and use it daily so I'm not some Linux n00b and I've never got on with tiling VMs. I started to think that maybe the issue is just that I don't like existing tiling WMs, so I started to write my own. After about 2 days of coding I realized that the issue wasn't that other tiling WMs suck, the issue was me: I just prefer floating windows which I can snap via drag and dropping when I want tiling. In fact Kwin is already my perfect WM. I had seen all these screenshots and work colleagues using i3, Awesome, dwm and such like and looking ultra cool (from a nerdy point of view) and fooled myself into thinking this is what I should be doing too without realizing that I was already happy and productive without them.

KronisLV 5y ago

Heh, i feel like maybe hardware constraints also play a role here. For example, right now i have 4 1080p monitors connected to my computer. I've never really needed anything more than the ability to snap windows to either side of the monitors (or bottom/top for vertical ones) or make them full screen. With a higher resolution monitor (or an ultra widescreen one) i suspect that it would rapidly change and i'd need to look into either more advanced snapping setups (e.g. AquaSnap or PowerToys FancyZones on Windows, or the Linux equivalent, though even XFCE is pretty flexible out of the box there). That said, on a laptop i probably wouldn't even try doing that and in many cases the software where i would actually want some sort of tiling already has it baked in - SSH clients like MobaXTerm (though Remmina is also nice on *nix) or all of JetBrains products. Tiling OS windows with smaller sizes feels rather inefficient, because many OSes out there waste space immensely with menus and other always visible items. But hey, i'd argue that my current setup only has manageable cognitive load because i use overlapping windows managers as "optionally tileable" and due to the amount of monitors have a maximum of 8 open windows without any overlapping. Someone might achieve the same with a single (albeit larger) monitor and a proper tiling manager.

falsaberN1 5y ago

I must be one of the few that doesn't favor tiling as well. Kinda. My setup is unusual. Allow me two paragraphs to describe it and then why tiling wouldn't work for me. I usually have 3 windows open at a given time, either a terminal/IM/notes program at the bottom right corner, vlc/deadbeef/copyq/scrcpy at the top right corner, and everything else is the main program I'm working with (2/3rds of the screen width, 100% of height, so stuff like Firefox, Krusader, vscode, Godot, Blender/Krita/GIMP/Inkscape, Audacity, qemu/Virtualbox, etc). I use 3 hotkeys to put a window into one of those 3 spots, via wmctrl, everything else is floating. If things get messy (like if I need a few virtual machines and seeing their contents all at once) I use virtual desktops. I also assigned hotkeys that either open or focus specific programs (like meta+X to focus Konsole or launch it if it doesn't exist, meta+E for Krusader...) so I can quickly switch to them even if they are at the bottom of the stack or aren't opened yet. Got all sorts of custom launchers, clipboard processing and a lot more functions available to key combinations I can do with my left hand only (it's the "alt+tab" hand so I extended it to all important shortcuts). The layout is a standard Windows style bottom panel (Used to have an Unity-style left sidebar but that gave me whiplash when using other computers) full of info/alert plasmoids, including custom ones. All support scripts are fairly universal and mostly work in other desktops, but KDE has nice configuration options to automate window settings, so it works better with it. Also got custom themes but I have no idea how to port them out of KDE. So KDE it is. Anyway with the description out of the way, tiling might work fine if all you work with is terminals, a browser and other text sources, but for that I'd rather just have tmux managing the important stuff and extra Konsole tabs for the minor operations (or to passively display output of updates in a new self-destructing tab so it gets rid of itself if I forget to close after seeing the output). Because I work with many visual tools that need plenty of space (and don't like sudden resizing) the tiling workflow just can't work for me, anyway. I can see why some would prefer it, though. As I said my use case is unusual. (Yeah I know artists would rather use Windows or Macs but my job requires Linux. My creative things are a hobby, but I wanted to have my cake and eat it. KDE has enough flexibility to let me hack it into submission, so it's not bad at all.)

Saint_Genet 5y ago

TBH, it feels like so many "hackerish" people spend so muck time dinking around with their environment they don't get much else done. I used to be that way too when I first started using Linux back in the 90s, but nowadays I mostly run with whatever the defaults are and concentrate on my work.

tokamak-teapot 5y ago

I sometimes keep 2 or three windows 'tiled' on a 34" monitor, but on anything smaller I tend to use 1 or perhaps 2 windows (like you, often with some overlap). Perhaps eyesight is important here? I'm short sighted but find wearing glasses when reading a monitor gives me eye strain, so just keep a distance from my monitor where I can read without my glasses (about 1m). To tile windows in a way that is useful I'd need to have much smaller fonts, and I wouldn't be able to read.

jraph 5y ago

> I must be one of the very few "hackerish" minded people that does not really get the appeal of tiling window managers Are we very few, or just non vocal? I maximize the windows I work on. When I need to see two things on a screen, my window manager's ability to place windows side by side using the mouse or keyboard shortcuts is more than enough. I usually disable compositing to make shadows disappear when I do this, they are distracting. Kwin (like more window managers I think) can place windows side by side (left - right or top - bottom), or one window on each corner of the screen. I can't imagine needing to see more than 4 windows at the same time. Seeing three / four windows is already more than distracting enough for me. My brain is too small for that. They wouldn't hold enough information anyway since I zoom text quite a bit, so I can be far from my screen and watch it for long hours without tiring my eyes. When I notice colleagues tiling their terminal sessions with Terminator I feel claustrophobic. Konsole offers this now, but I've been sticking with tabs so far.

lewispollard 5y ago
> I can't imagine needing to see more than 4 windows at the same time. Seeing three / four windows is already more than distracting enough for me. KDE + bismuth user, with dual screens. Terminal, IDE, window for the application I'm working on, browser for the documentation of the framework or tool I'm using. Sometimes an extra browser window for miscellaneous searching. Sometimes MS Teams is in the mix there too. Oh and as you mentioned, terminal is usually tmuxed into 2 or more panes. And if I do need to focus down to one maximised window, meta+m to toggle "monocle" layout which maximises and removes borders. But, I have ADHD and find that if something isn't visible in front of me, it's basically non-existent from the point of view of my working memory.

nvarsj 5y ago

I can sort of see what you’re saying, but the cognitive management of what you describe sounds like a huge pain. I use PaperWM and it’s awesome. It just gets out of my way and let’s me manage tons of apps and windows with ease and 0 manual window management. The sliding window tiling approach is also much better imo than that of i3 style, especially on large/widescreen monitors. As an aside, it’s interesting to me that it’s predominantly OS X users that “don’t see the point in tiling WMs”.

blindstitch 5y ago

I half agree. I used the tiling window manager i3 for about a year, then gnome for the past two years. I really do like to move windows around and arrange them, it feels sort of tactile. I like the simple extensibility of i3 - even as a novice programmer it was possible for me to add new features and even build my own custom python bindings to add more nuanced controls. After a while i3 did become a sort of second brain and it felt like I could keep various domains of life separate very effectively when I was going to school reading and writing a lot, working part time at a job that required lots of terminal windows, and doing my leisure computing all on the same machine. Life has changed and I no longer have a need for balancing all that stuff at once and my window management needs are simpler, a handful of browser windows mostly. When things get complex gnome is only about 50% as good as I need it to be to manage many things going on at once, though. Alt-tab application switching is a trash paradigm that is terrible no matter the OS.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

I think tiling is better, but to each their own. And tiling WMs don't mean everything is constantly changing. I think you have a good point about the sidebars of webpages. A lot of webpages don't cope very well with being put in a narrow window like documentation beside a code editor. A lot of cruft, padding, menubars etc tend to take up unmoveable space. It would be nice if we could pan and zoom that kind of stuff out of the way. But I personally use something in the middle. I have 9 virtual desktops (mapped directly to the numpad on my keyboard using KDE's shortcuts) with some static tiled configurations of the apps I use daily. This way I can quickly check an IM that comes in and snap back to my work stuff in an instant. But like I said, whatever works for you! I don't think it's a matter of one size fits all. The only thing I really miss about KDE is having virtual desktops switchable per monitor, not as a whole set of all monitors together :(