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by blankslate 5497 days ago
Sadly, the article completely fails to mention the amazingly useful innovations made by tiling window managers like wmii, ion3 and xmonad.

Granted, they're not as new as Unity et al, but they offer a compelling, complete and fairly radical departure from tradition, and one that I really do miss on OS X.
1 comments
rbanffy 5496 days ago
Windows 1 used tiled windows (MS programmers didn't learn how to overlap windows until Windows 2) and Emacs has them since the 70's. I am not sure if tiling windows could be called innovation.
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username3 5496 days ago
The first version (Windows 1.0) featured a tiling window manager, partly because of litigation by Apple claiming ownership of the overlapping window desktop metaphor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager#History
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Symmetry 5496 days ago
There's a big difference between just having tiling windows and having all the features that make them more useful than a stacking windows manager.

But really we should be giving credit to Plan 9 here for pioneering the model of the modern tiling windows manager.

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rbanffy 5496 days ago
Plan 9 deserves a whole lot more credit than just that. It's really a shame we are still using Unix-like OSs and not Plan 9-like ones.
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