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by idoubtit 2327 days ago
> impossible to do without PIP.

This is not my experience. I see no added value in this PIP.

I use XMonad, which is a tiling window manager. I've always been able to put a video into applicative full screen, then switch the layout to whatever I want. E.g. 2 browsers windows each playing a borderless video.

Before XMonad, I remember that when I switched to another workspace/window and back, my browser window would have stopped being fullscreen.

I'd rather have Firefox not adding hacks to work around the flaws of mainstream window managers.

2 comments

There's a reason I mentioned only i3 and sway, they stick to managing _windows_ and thus only inform the application of their window size. Screen size is unabated by them, thus when applications that have a full screen mode size-up they get the real screen size. I3 author(s) specify purity as their reasoning for this and I actually agree with them. There are some other nuances with full screen that tie into this, too, such as signalling to the app to enter full screen instead of simply resizing the applications window means in most cases the user gets a more intuitive result.
XMonad's[0] default behaviour of being able to separately tell a program to go "fullscreen" (i.e. hide most UI) and control what portion of the screen its window takes up is extremely valuable, since many programs don't give you the option of separately hiding their UI, and it's only possible by making them go fullscreen. However, being able to hide the UI is actually most valuable when there is more than one window on the screen... This is especially important when you have a small (or average-sized) screen, but it's also useful on larger ones to avoid distractions.

Getting the "normal" fullscreen is just two keyboard shortcuts away ("fullscreen" the program and assign its window the entire screen), rather than one. From an intuitiveness point of view, being able to hide a program's UI and change its window size separately is arguably more intuitive — according to the separation of concerns, the former is managed by the program itself and the latter by the WM.

PiP is really nice, but videos aren't the content for which getting a distraction-free experience is most important...

[0] I'm sure that it's also possible with other tiling WMs such as ratpoison, stumpwm, awesome etc.

That sounds more like xmonad isn’t honouring WM hints properly? Might be handy but is that a ‘failing’ of mainstream window managers?