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by inclemnet
1462 days ago
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> I think the "traditional" family of tiling window managers (like ratpoison, awesome, dwm, xmonad, i3, etc) are kind of simplistic in their assumptions that 1. they can at any time force any window into any size and position, and 2. they must always force every window into some size and position. Interestingly I like tiling window managers due to specifically the opposite perspective, that applications are often selfish in their assumption that they can display themselves wherever they like and I much prefer ignoring their (usually-wrong) assumptions about what's best. I don't mean that argumentatively, just a different preference I guess. In this respect I even agree with the first two steps of your algorithm - it's just that "in my tiling layout" is the result of both of them! |
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It really depends on your perspective I guess, but I'm of the exact opposite opinion: the window manager has no way of knowing what is the optimal size for an application window, because if it did, it'd be trying too hard to do the application's job. Say I'd like to display a picture in a separate "preview" window. The picture could be larger, or roughly equal, to the available screen space: in this case the optimal size for the window is to take up as much space as there is available (not necessarily full screen - you may want to keep another window open and visible). But if the picture is smaller, making a bigger window would just waste the screen real estate. The window manager has no way of knowing these things - it can either trust the application to make the right call, or disregard it, in the latter case making it the user's problem.
I work on a 43 inch screen and most "traditional" tiling WMs are completely unusable, precisely because their assumptions about optimal window sizes are almost always completely wrong.
In my opinion, even on a smaller screen, if you need your window manager to constantly "fix" what your application is doing, then the application sucks. If a window manager can only assume all applications suck, then it itself, must also suck for applications that don't. It's a no-win scenario - you need to be able to trust your software.