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Tiling is awesomeTiling is awesomePosted Dec 24, 2012 8:51 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: Tiling is awesome by rsidd Parent article: Awesome 3.5 released
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.
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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.
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