This is part of the new PowerToys utilities. There's already a post on Hacker News front page about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20890828
Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager
51–60 of 172 posts
Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager
#52for those unfamiliar with it, there's also 'divvy', which has a mac and windows client. https://mizage.com/divvy/ I use it on my 34" monitor.
User on OSX before, and on windows since the start! They gonna have to pry WinDivvy from my dead cold hands.
Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager
#53Recently been forced to work on Windows, been looking for a tiling windows manager for Windows. I'm used to i3/Sway. Played with it a bit. It has some good ideas, but hopefully they keep adding features. Some things it's missing (that most or all tiling WMs have): - Custom keyboard shortcuts - ability to switch focus quickly with keyboard shortcuts (move to window to right/left, instead of alt-tabbing through all ope…
Also coming to Windows from an i3 background, I've set up a custom autohotkey script that handles a lot of window management stuff for me on windows 10.
F1 - Run or switch to Outlook
F2 - Run or switch to Firefox
F3 - Run or switch to Emacs
...
F9 - Cycle windows in app
F10 - previous window (alt+tab)
F11 - maximize / restore
F12 - Kill window
It's not tiling, but it's a potent workflow.
Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager
#54This looks neat. This is a kind of window manager I have wanted for quite a while on OSX
Multiple desktops are pretty useful though.
They are, but it's not exactly the same. I want to customize my current Desktop with multiple windows arranged "just so."
Mulitple desktops with windows nicely arranged on each is even better.
Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager
#55This is great.
I had some difficulty using it on multiple monitors though.
Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my opinion, the major disadvantage of current tiling WMs like i3 is that they don't make effective use of the mouse, which can be a very efficient input device for some usages. If this product is able to change that, then that could outweigh the pain of the awkward configuration for me.
Regarding the mouse... thats the entire point of i3, i.e. to make it all keyboard-driven. It's sort of like saying "the problem with cars is that they don't make effective use of the horse". i3 doesn't do anything to prevent you using the mouse for whatever application you like.
The point is to use the mouse for window management not just on the applications. Now, i haven't used i3, but from a tiling window manager i'd expect at minimum that i can drag-drop windows with the mouse between "zones" and resize the zone boundaries interactively with the mouse.
For extra stuff i'd like using the wheel up/down on a title bar to minimize/restore a zone, drag-dropping a window over another window to create a zone made out of tab-like title bars, ctrl+clicking multiple titlebars to select multiple windows (so that, e.g, drag-dropping them to another zone would put all of them as tabbed windows in there or being able to close all of them either via a shortcut or via a popup menu command, and/or commands to merge them in one tabbed zone, or split tabbed zone(s) to individual zones), right clicking on a zone separator to offer a popup with commands to split/merge the zone, move the splitter at some specific percentage, etc, drag-dropping one or more windows at the edge of the screen to create a new zone (or set of zones for multiple windows).
There are so many things you can add with a mouse, especially if instead of thinking of it as a car vs horse you think of it as what it actually is: an additional input device that is right next to your keyboard and unlike the keyboard it provides precise analog input for 2D motion.
As a starting point you can check what pretty much every IDE with support for tiling does (e.g. the recent versions of Visual Studio - not VSCore, the real one).
Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager
#57I tried using a custom "window manager" for Windows a while ago (back in the Vista days IIRC) and it didn't really work well. The main problem was that, as far as I could tell, the window manager couldn't really preempt the windows and force them to show up in a certain way. Instead it basically asked them "pretty please, could you show up at this location with these dimensions?". As a result frozen apps (such as gra…
Yeah, even Windows 10 Tablet Mode is pretty poorly supported in windows apps, and that's just "fullscreen all the things" - it tends to fall over on dialog boxes and the like.
Not surprised that more sophisticated alternate window-layout systems would also fail badly.
Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager
#58> ... also to restore these layouts quickly.
This is the most frustrating problem I have with Microsoft Windows, which frequently needs a reboot (to satisfy update obligations, or just to try to fix degraded performance).
After more than twenty years having my preferred desktop environment (KDE) bring back all my application windows, laid out as they were prior to reboot, across multiple virtual desktops, it's profoundly frustrating to have to spend several minutes each time trying to recreate my layout on Microsoft Windows 10.
Yes, tiling WMs etc may solve (for small values) this in different ways, but the fact remains that after a reboot on Microsoft Windows I'm back to a pristine desktop each and every time.
Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager
#59I know that several of my Windows-based co-workers will like this. Looking at the screenshots it does look cumbersome though. The real power of i3 is it's simplicity. You are not overwhelmed by complicated constructs. This appears to be a more static approach to tiling 'I want Layout #3' vs 'Open a new window here'. I really hope this catches on. It's a fantastic productivity booster that I feel is on-par with having…
In my opinion, the major disadvantage of current tiling WMs like i3 is that they don't make effective use of the mouse, which can be a very efficient input device for some usages. If this product is able to change that, then that could outweigh the pain of the awkward configuration for me.
The mouse works great in Sway for resizing splits, moving floating windows, and changing window focus.
Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager
#60This seems like a good time to plug my tiling window manager for Windows, workspacer. https://www.workspacer.org/
I use xmonad on my linux machines, and wanted something similar for Window, so workspacer trys to replicate that style of window manager (configurable via writing C#, dynamic layouts, etc).
I've been using it every day for about a year, but its still pretty early, there are some applications for which it freaks out, but for the most part it works! What it really needs is a good set of docs and a bunch of examples, but I haven't had any time to flesh it out.
I was hoping to see some unique tricks in the source for Fancy Zones, but it looks like it more or less does the same thing as workspacer, managing the set of open windows and occasionally calling SetWindowPos.