Preferences

I've never been able to make tiling-first environments work for me (even if they have a floating mode). Things that aren't terminals or text editors tend to not tile well, particularly on smaller screens, and using them entails a level of window micromanagement that I don't engage in with floating-first environments.

The ability to overlap is also actually pretty valuable for me. Often I don't need to see a whole window, just the pertinent portion, and sometimes window edges peeking out from behind my browser window act like post-it note style reminders.

It's nice to be able to snap windows into grid positions on occasion (preferably without aero snap, the animations for that erroneously trigger way too often on multi monitor setups) but it's easy enough to bolt that onto a floating WM.


> The ability to overlap is also actually pretty valuable for me. Often I don't need to see a whole window, just the pertinent portion, and sometimes window edges peeking out from behind my browser window act like post-it note style reminders.

I have occasionally thought about a system where you can zoom and scroll a view on a window, but without telling the program that you're doing it. So for example, you could crop into say firefox and only show the actual page (completely cutting out toolbars and such) without it resizing itself. This is mostly of interest on smaller screens, but it'd still give you efficiency gains on a bigger screen.

Firefox has two forms of zooming, one of which resemble what you're describing.

1. Zooming with Ctrl++ or Ctrl+- will "tell the page" that it's being zoomed and it will reflow into the new viewport size.

2. Zooming with two-finger pinch (requires a touchpad) will zoom in as if magnifying the page. Content on the page will overflow to the right instead of reflowing.

Supporting an equivalent on regular desktop windows could be pretty useful.

That would be a useful feature, so long as there's some associated UI that makes it obvious that the feature is active along with an easy way to toggle it off. Seems like it could be one of those features that users accidentally trigger without realizing it and then feel "trapped" not knowing how to make it stop.
Check out scrolling window managers. Niri, paperwm etc.

The windows are almost always full height and you just scroll to next or previous windows in the Workspace. It reduces the spatial navigation to just one axis and works pretty well on ultrawides.

Might give them a try when I get the chance, but I'm skeptical that those will be much better than tiling for my usage, particularly as someone who prefers a centered main monitor and angled secondary monitor over ultrawides.
Paper wms still tile. As in you can tile vertically as well. The difference is new windows open to the side full height, instead of trying to cram into a potentially already crammed layout. It’s really powerful when you want to open a pdf or an image or something related to the stuff you are working on in a tiled workspace but don’t want to resize everything.
I just Alt+Tab instead and keep most windows centered.
The issue with alt tab and the main reason why I personally eventually moved into tiling managers is the reliability.

Alt tab often requires two things: 1) Figuring out how many clicks to away your desired window is, as they change 2) executing those multiple key presses correctly

When you compare this situation with a wm where you place or permanently bind certain windows to a number (eg messaging apps are always CMD + 0 for me) then you can see how you can grow to prefer the certainty, there's no more fiddling for the window you're looking for.

Windows actually sort of had this feature with windows + numbers as that focused the window by order on the bottom bar, but lately with window groupings and things like that it breaks for common use cases such as multiple browser windows.

> messaging apps are always CMD + 0 for me

How is this related to tiling managers if you can do exactly the same thing without them in your generic shortcut utility?

There is also a downside of this certainty: you always need to keep in mind the two recent apps you're working with (for some uncommon apps you wouldn't even have a predefined CMD+0) and then your CMD+0 wouldn't help if you have multiple messenger windows and need to switch between two

It is not specific to tiling managers I suppose, but it does beat alt tab.
I use both. The main point was having windows centered and switching them in place, without having them in any fixed arrangement.
I experienced some of these issues. For me, what eventually clicked is either simple automated tiling (xmonad with fullscreen and split horizontal/vertical) or Emacs-like manual tiling (StumpWM). I don't have a huge screen, so more than two windows is a stretch. Both of these WMs are decent at floating layouts.

Besides, I find the simple tiling offered by the stock GNOME Display Manager, which is similar to the way I use xmonad, good enough. Given that GNOME has great support for floating windows, that is perhaps an option you should look into.

This item has no comments currently.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Story Lists

j
Next story
k
Previous story
Shift+j
Last story
Shift+k
First story
o Enter
Go to story URL
c
Go to comments
u
Go to author

Navigation

Shift+t
Go to top stories
Shift+n
Go to new stories
Shift+b
Go to best stories
Shift+a
Go to Ask HN
Shift+s
Go to Show HN

Miscellaneous

?
Show this modal