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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...) |
"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.