[kimjongtrill]

For me the built in shortcuts to snap things to the left, right, and push to second monitor are all I really need and I get both tiling and non-tiling with windows/OS X/gnome... never understood why people go i3 when the shortcuts are built in to what you likely are already using. To each their own though, if i3 works better for y’all I think that is great too.

[flyingcircus3]

The built-in snapping only works for two windows per screen though. If you want 3 or more, you're stuck with the mouse.

[doubleunplussed]

There's the gtile gnome shell extension. I have shortcuts defined to snap windows to predetermined regions of the screen, which can be defined on an arbitrary grid.

That plus gnome's builtin shortcuts to move windows to different monitors and different desktops, and setting alt-tab to "switch windows directly" gives me pretty much everything I need.

Windows don't start tiled, but this doesn't feel like a big drawback. When matplotlib pops up five plot windows I'd rather they stay the aspect ratio they were intended, anyway. But I'll snap my text editors, terminals, and file browser windows to half/quarter of the screen.

It's pretty great, and I get to stay within GNOME which is the 'happy path' for linux desktop use IMHO.

[city41]

Yeah, it really is about preference. FWIW, i3 allows you to opt out of tiling if you really want to. For me it's alt+shift+space, and the window pops out onto its own layer, and can then be manipulated with the mouse.

[SuperPaintMan]

Yup, this is what I use for editing. Vifm in whatever directory I'm working it but small and floating. Mod+Spc focuses my nav, Mod+Spc to focus the underlying windows.

Have it set up to spawn vim or VSCode instances using shared buffers and it's crazy handy. I can't go back to vimsplits!

[neoromantique]

Shortcuts are great when you have two windows, not so much when you have more than four