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Tiling is awesomeTiling is awesomePosted Dec 24, 2012 6:27 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)Parent article: Awesome 3.5 released
Not about awesome, but about tiling window managers. I recently switched to i3 after getting frustrated with gnome, unity and even xfce. It took me a few minutes to "get it" and now I wonder why I didn't do this earlier -- I remember reading about ratpoison years ago and wondering "what's the point?" The point is to maximise your use of the screen and minimise the use of your mouse, and tiling works great both on tiny screens like my tablet and large screens like my desktop.
I did give awesome, and also xmonad, a spin before settling on i3. My reasons for i3 are rather specific -- I wanted the same setup on three computers, one of which is an ARM tablet with a keyboard case, where I had trouble with installing awesome and xmonad (the latter because of its haskell dependency). But in terms of getting up and running, all of these seem rather similar: I expect they would all have worked for me.
Of course, all this is only for those who'd rather live on the keyboard and are happy to edit plain-text config files.
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Tiling is awesome Posted Dec 24, 2012 6:37 UTC (Mon) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link]
I have the same story as you, though I settled on wmii rather than i3.
Congrats and thanks to the Awesome developers for all their hard work!
Tiling is awesome Posted Dec 24, 2012 8:51 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] It took me a few minutes to "get it" and now I wonder why I didn't do this earlier -- I remember reading about ratpoison years ago and wondering "what's the point?" The point is to maximise your use of the screen and minimise the use of your mouse, and tiling works great both on tiny screens like my tablet and large screens like my desktop. Right. This was known to Microsoft's developers thirty years ago. Unfortunately most people were unable to understand that back then and they can not understand that now. That's why tiling WMs are tiny niche and why developers don't bother to test their applications with them which it turn makes them much less useful.
Tiling is awesome Posted Dec 24, 2012 9:08 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
In practice, most Windows users use a very inefficient form of tiling: they maximise each window and switch between maximised windows with alt-tab or the taskbar.
What I often want to do is maximise 2 or 3 windows vertically, while fitting them into the same screen (without overlapping) horizontally. I was doing that manually with other WMs, but with i3 it's automatic.
BTW, your wiki link suggests that Windows 1.0 went for tiling not because the developers preferred it but because they were afraid of Apple.
Tiling is awesome Posted Dec 24, 2012 14:04 UTC (Mon) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link] Speaking of Windows, this is one thing that Microsoft got *absolutely right* in Windows 7, which is another reason that Win8's UI is such a shame. If you've never used it, there's a good write up of the thing. This behavior is hidden in plain sight in that you can continue to work as usual without knowing it's there but have a decent chance of discovering it "by mistake" at the very moment you try and do what it helps you do anyway. It allows average people to get their toes wet with tiling without having to take the plunge. Pure UI win, IMO. The whole "Engineering" series at that blog is a wonderful read. You may not always like their conclusions, and perhaps some of the methodology is flawed, but there are lots of numbers and quite a few insightful comments about how the "common" UIs of today got to be the way they are.
Tiling is awesome Posted Dec 24, 2012 14:55 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
The snap stuff is there in Ubuntu/Compiz, and I think kde/kwin too. I liked it. But on the whole I found those environments bloated and sluggish after the initial eyecandy factor wore off.
Tiling is awesome Posted Dec 24, 2012 15:34 UTC (Mon) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
I believe there's something similar in KDE, but I cannot comment on Compiz.
This sort of simple behavior doesn't have to go with a bloated environment. It's the biggest frustration-reducer since "placing windows within a few px of edges or other windows causes them to snap together" and "size window to max height/width without overlapping" options. Little things like this make managing windows much more pleasant.
Tiling is awesome Posted Dec 24, 2012 15:57 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
Which WM does "size window to maximum without overlapping"? Or is that in an option in Windows 7?
Another feature I like, on several linux WMs, is middle-click maximise to maximise vertically only. But I think Windows doesn't do much with the middle button...
Tiling is awesome Posted Dec 24, 2012 18:52 UTC (Mon) by Holmes1869 (guest, #42043) [Link]
I'm using KDE 4.9 with Fedora (so kwin), and the splitting windows w/o overlapping works very nicely. I use Windows 7 in my day job and also found that to be a huge win over XP. I like KDE's a bit better because it can do 4 quadrants, not just two vertical sides. Good stuff.
Tiling is awesome Posted Dec 24, 2012 19:19 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Which WM does "size window to maximum without overlapping"? It's called maximumize in Compiz and it was there for over five years. Not sure about KDE.
Tiling is awesome Posted Jan 6, 2013 3:02 UTC (Sun) by nickbp (subscriber, #63605) [Link]
Compiz has a "Grid" plugin which provides shortcuts for placing windows in a tiled layout. I liked it enough at the time that I ended up implementing similar functionality as a standalone executable: http://nickbp.com/gridmgr/
But at the moment I just use Awesome.
Tiling is awesome Posted Dec 26, 2012 16:30 UTC (Wed) by hendry (subscriber, #50859) [Link]
i3 has quite a few dependencies compared to the original "suck less" tiling window manager: dwm http://dwm.suckless.org/
Tiling is awesome Posted Jan 6, 2013 3:03 UTC (Sun) by nickbp (subscriber, #63605) [Link]
I'm genuinely curious: What's wrong with dependencies?
Tiling is awesome Posted Jan 6, 2013 17:45 UTC (Sun) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
Some people consider them dirty.
Tiling is awesome Posted Jan 7, 2013 5:24 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
The problem with having too many dependencies is that there becomes a high probability of dependency conflicts and loops.
It also becomes much harder to test the new version of something when it has lots of dependencies and you therefor end up needing new versions of all those dependencies.
There is a trade off in this area. You don't want each program reinventing the wheel, but you don't want a program to have a hundred external packages that it depends on either.
Finding the right balance between the extremes is hard. The fact that people disagree on what points there is a problem just makes it harder.
Modularity and minimalism Posted Jan 7, 2013 5:29 UTC (Mon) by jrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link]
> It also becomes much harder to test the new version of something when it has lots of dependencies and you therefor end up needing new versions of all those dependencies.
Not to mention that dependencies sometimes break API.
More importantly, too much reliance on the wrong components can produce inefficient and unpleasant code. http://www.dreamsongs.com/MobSoftware.html
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