[errantmind]

> I even briefly used a tiling window manager before very quickly returning to the floating ones; the appeal of such utterly inflexible window management I will simply never understand.

The author mentions this design in passing but I think it is contextually important to understand why people might like this at all so I'll share what I appreciate about tiling window managers:

The appeal, for me, is the inflexibility. Tiling window managers and their often bundled 'tags' approach to window management offer a simplicity that is comforting in its constancy to me, the user. To sum it up, they make me feel 'at home' using my computer. Comfy goes beyond familiarity though.

I never have a mess of windows to deal with across my monitors, where I'm constantly needing to look at a taskbar, minimizing and un-minimizing programs (or looking through a stack of 'shaded' windows in the author's case). Each of my frequently used programs has its own tag, or shares a tag (visually as a tile) with other programs. While the programs I have open at any one time change, their locations don't. Everything in its right place, I always know what is where. I switch between all programs directly with ease, with no intermediate interruptions to occupy my attention, my hands never leaving my keyboard. No 'looking' for stuff. Switches happen instantly because there are no transitions or any other forms of detectable latency (and for that matter, no compositor either). Combine all this with extensive use of scratchpads for ad-hoc and exploratory tasks and all the bases have been covered. Comfy.

[layer8]

In a very similar vein, on Windows I use WindowManager [0] to always open windows in the same position, based on application and/or window title. There's a global keyboard shortcut to save the size and position of the current window, so that it’s automatically restored to that same size and position the next time (and every subsequent time) it is opened. For many applications, using that keyboard shortcut once is enough, but one can define more sophisticated criteria in the configuration dialog. This basically provides the same benefits as described by the parent.

I don't like tiling window managers, because I want most windows to be roughly centered in my field of view, and also vertically maximized. Actually, what I really want to be centered is the relevant contents of each window, which generally isn’t the same as centering the window itself, due to sidebars and other application-specific layout vagaries. Hence the necessity to save size and position per application. I also rarely need to see multiple windows simultaneously side-by-side. Having the windows centered and full size (if not full screen) trumps the drawback of having to press Alt+Tab or other keyboard shortcuts to switch between them.

[0] https://www.desksoft.com/WindowManager.htm

[walteweiss]

I remember I used Aston on Windows XP back in the day. All of my programs were assigned to their hot keys and I never left my keyboard. On top of that it ate less ram than a regular explorer.exe of Windows!

A couple of decades later, I went through so many macOS versions, Windows 7,8,10 and different Gnome/KDE/Xfce etc., to find out just recently (well, a couple of years by now) that sway wm (or i3wm for X11) is a thing. What a relief! I’m back into old calm days with no eternal switching and multitasking that takes so much of my attention, giving nothing in return. God, I wish I knew about that much much earlier! When I left Windows for good, that was the only thing I missed so much! Now I enjoy that and 300 MB of occupied ram out of my 16 or 32 GB setups. Would highly recommend to any nerd like me!

[sph]

Tiling is not great, but I believe is better than floating window managers. Yet neither are good enough in 2023.

In floating systems, partially covered windows are useless and usually avoided: either you want to see everything, or you minimize the window. The few times one tries to actually keep a partially covered window (i.e. show only the last few lines of a terminal visible), the UX is terrible because as soon as you switch focus the visibility of the entire stack of windows changes, and you need to click around/Alt-Tab to restore the previous layout. For this reason, 99% of people just have a single window that's maximized per workspace.

Tiling window managers could be decent if they were a core experience, but in reality no one develops apps for them so you always have some popup that spawns and fills half your screen.

The major shortcoming of both is that they only work in rectangular, desktop-sized screens. Mobile UIs avoid both, and default to single-window-always-maximized, which still isn't good enough.

Scrollable tiling managers, however, would be the bee's knees: windows are laid out on an infinitely scrollable horizontal layout, which would also easily replicate the common side-by-side layout "power users" often rely on. There are some niche experiments like PaperWM, but they haven't ironed out the UX for some reason: if they just made the entire layout scrollable by panning on your touchpad/mobile screen, it would instantly be better than anything we have today, and free us from the tyranny of window management. Additionally, it would work with both our widescreen, cinema-sized desktop monitors, and mobile devices.

(I have never used it and memory might fail me, but I seem to remember Palm webOS devices had this scrollable "card" layout system which people seemed to like a lot. See https://www.palmtotal.com/sites/www.palmtotal.com/files/imag...)

[mst]

> The few times one tries to actually keep a partially covered window (i.e. show only the last few lines of a terminal visible), the UX is terrible because as soon as you switch focus the visibility of the entire stack of windows changes

"pop window to front on focus" is a choice - in fvwm2 by default it doesn't happen, you need to click the window decoration to bring one to the front and can focus it just fine without doing so.

I use focus follows mouse as well so all I have to do is put the cursor over wherever I currently want to type into, but while I personally think the combination of the two is more than the sum of its parts, 'windows stay put Z-order wise' is great on its own too.

> Scrollable tiling managers, however, would be the bee's knees: windows are laid out on an infinitely scrollable horizontal layout, which would also easily replicate the common side-by-side layout "power users" often rely on.

I have a small script called xclus (https://trout.me.uk/X11/xclus) that fires up my xterms pre-tiled and scroll around them - including sometimes borrowing the left hand pair of the screen's worth to the right to end up having six dedicated to a task rather than four. Looks a like https://trout.me.uk/screenshot4.png in practice, look at the pager at the bottom to see the pre-tiled ones that I can scroll across to.

[hackeraccount]

I remember using some X11 windowmanager way back with desktop resolution higher then the the monitor. If you put the cursor on an edge it would scroll over.

It was surprisingly nice but in retrospect a bit too mouse heavy.

I've since gone over to tiling. Sway in particular.

[mst]

My fvwm2 setup is like that (the config line "DeskTopSize 3x3" does the trick) plus keybindings to jump the cursor a half or a whole screen so I don't usually need to touch the mouse while navigating around (focus follows mouse is essential to this).

[foul]

I was thinking about switching to Ian Jackson's wm of choice, vtwm [1], but the fact that fvwm has even that it's incredible.

FVWM is truly the living bible of window management.

[1] vtwm.org

[hawkguy]

On my Mac I use a combination of floating windows (I use Spectacle to snap them around), Cmd+Tab to scroll through open applications, and Spotlight search to open new applications. Hands never leave the keyboard to find/open the window I want and it feels very comfortable to me.

The main drawback is that I absolutely never see my desktop background, but that’s about it.