Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 172 posts

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#71

Post by snaptravisty »

clircle wrote: post #53
Miner49er wrote: post #24

Recently 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.

For the launch, open of applications I use Win+Position on super bar.

Win+1 Explorer

Win+2 Firefox

Win+...

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#72

Post by kryogen1c »

Im a huge fan of window management, so I'll definitely check this out.

Incumbents are pretty strong, though. Windows 10 introduced Snap, which easily breaks your screen into halves or quadrants

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4027324/windows-10-...

Sysinternals, well known for simple powerfull tools, makes a program called Desktops. It creates a total of 4 sets of desktops you can hotkey between.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/desk...

sysinternals desktops multiplies my 3 monitors and gives me 12, and a few are quartered or halved. 16 "sections" in use pretty commonly with no extra software or hardware cost.

It should be noted that my work computer has 8gb ram and an i5, so if i can do it you can too : )

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#73

Post by metaloqui »

GuiA wrote: post #49
simias wrote: post #32

I 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…

I’ve encountered similar issues with macOS tiling window managers. At the end of the day, you’re bolting on behaviors that the original designers of the system didn’t intend you to, and there’s always going to be tension there. When I’m on Linux I love using xmonad/i3, but on other platforms I’ve learned to accept the defaults; otherwise you just end up using things that work most of the time, but not really, and it’…

I've had a lot of success with Amethyst, can't imagine using my Mac without it now.

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#74

Post by y4mi »

polar wrote: post #48
efdee wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely one that weeds out the millennials from the old guard ;-)

Millenials are older than you think. :)

do they know the powertoys heritage though?

also: i'm not sure i agree with <19 yrs old people being ... "old"

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#75

Post by jchw »

Speaking of tiling window managers in new environments, I’ve had a really positive experience with Sway, the i3-compatible Wayland compositor. Almost everything you need can be done, someone has even written an OBS plugin capable of capturing from it (and any other wl_roots-based compositor.) I think when Chrome, Firefox and Electron all ship a WebRTC build capable of capturing from wl_roots based compositors, there will be no practical downsides to Sway over X11/i3. (There’s already plenty of cool things about it today.) That could take a while, though, since upstream WebRTC does not have support for this today.

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#76

Post by JerwuQu »

rickbutton wrote: post #60

This 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…

Oh! This is the closest I've seen to what I want when on Windows. I run linux at home but Windows at work, so I miss i3 a lot. I've tried some other tiling WM attempts for Windows before but none of them have worked very well...

I'll definitely give this a try!

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#77

Post by saagarjha »

rickbutton wrote: post #70
Siecje wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is different about some applications?

Some applications like to reset their own position occasionally, or don't take kindly to being resized from an outside process. WinSCP is an example where workspacer tries to resize/position the window, and WinSCP itself listens for the move event, and moves itself. workspacer gets that second move event, and cycles back and forth forever. For the few cases where it doesn't work right now, I have ignore routes setup…

> WinSCP is an example where workspacer tries to resize/position the window, and WinSCP itself listens for the move event, and moves itself.

Why?

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#78

Post by simias »

tinus_hn wrote: post #68
simias wrote: post #32

I 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…

Windows doesn’t really have a window manager like the concept from X11. Basically the apps get messages and by using the standard libraries to handle a selection of messages, you get the behavior you’d expect of a Windows app, like the maximizing and minimizing, resizing and the Windows 10 specific zooming behavior. But there is little coordination and no separate process that draws window frames or something like th…

Thank you for confirming my intuitions, I wasn't entirely sure if it was a hard limitation of the way Windows handled... windows or if it was just buggy software. So I guess this new WM suffers from the same limitations?

This experience actually made me wary of Wayland and other X11 replacements because, as far as I understand, they behave similarly. I could be completely wrong about that though because I still haven't completely figured out how Wayland actually works and every time I looked for infos on this particular topic I ended up more confused than when I started.

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#79

Post by rickbutton »

JerwuQu wrote: post #76
rickbutton wrote: post #60

This 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…

Oh! This is the closest I've seen to what I want when on Windows. I run linux at home but Windows at work, so I miss i3 a lot. I've tried some other tiling WM attempts for Windows before but none of them have worked very well... I'll definitely give this a try!

Please do! I haven't had time to work on it lately, but if there is interest in it I wouldn't mind picking it back up!

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#80

Post by omaranto »

Slenth wrote: post #66
shawnz wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that's a design goal of i3. I wasn't specifically talking about i3 though, in fact it seems like every tiling window manager has that philosophy and I think it is a mistake. Enabling effective use of the mouse doesn't negate the ability to use the keyboard effectively too -- they serve different use cases.

Would you mind elaborating on what use case you think a mouse could come in handy for when you would be using a tiling WM? I recently switched over to one and the only time I've used my mouse was when I had to click on something in Firefox.

The mouse could be convenient to resize or rearrange windows. For example, it would be nice if dragging one window onto another swapped them. I think that would be faster than swapping them with i3's shortcuts.
Post reply on HN