Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by avadodin 105 days ago
They are a bit out of fashion these days.

The main use-case was multiplexing terminals and, after tmux provided a solution that was usable by normal users, it seduced people away.

Also, mouse-first tiling was introduced on Windows so nowadays it is almost universal to have a degree of tiling.

They are nice for terminals and browsing properly-written web pages but for anything with an aspect ratio or a fixed size they are clumsy.

Modern tiling-wms often have a floating mode so the distinction is more keyboard-wm vs mouse-wm.
2 comments
saghm 104 days ago
> The main use-case was multiplexing terminals and, after tmux provided a solution that was usable by normal users, it seduced people away.

Are you sure about this history? I'd always heard that GNU Screen had been popular for a while before tmux, and from double checking, Screen dates back to 1987, the same year that Windows 2.0 came out. tmux didn't come for another two decades.

link
wolvoleo 104 days ago
Yes but screen didn't feature tiling when it first came out. That came much later.

It makes sense too because at that point most terminals were still physical with fixed dimensions. Most applications didn't handle terminal resizing yet. Especially on the fly.

link
avadodin 104 days ago
You are right.

Although I don't know about "popular".

To clarify, my impression was that many people started using tmux around the time when it was introduced including a few who had been using screen before.

link
wolvoleo 104 days ago
> They are nice for terminals and browsing properly-written web pages but for anything with an aspect ratio or a fixed size they are clumsy.

True but that's also a factor of tiling being so niche. If it were more common the apps would take it into account and just not so fixed sizes as much.

There's only few uses that really require it like video.

link