Rethinking Window Management

I really love the mosaic concept. I think it's indeed the missing piece for tiling on large displays. It's a kind of stack in usual tiling layouts, where all leftover windows are placed, but stacks tend to squeeze and deform windows, crippling many apps in the process. The mosaic approach can certainly avoid this issue, but it wastes some space (not ideal for small screens) and may not play well with big complex UIs(IDE, CAD, DAW, etc).

I like PaperWM[1] a lot.

1. https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM

* Putting maximized windows automagically in their own workspace is a horrible idea

> As you open more windows, the existing windows move aside to make room for the new ones. If a new window doesn’t fit (e.g. because it wants to be maximized) it moves to its own workspace.

I emphatically disagree fundamentally people want to put the windows they want in a particular workspace because they are often part of a related task. It also violates user expectations from virtually every interface on the planet including prior versions of gnome leading to confusion and frustration as the users mental model of usage will not naturally conflate making it bigger with changing workspaces.

* Even more broken under the broke way gnome handles multiple monitors

This presents additional challenges for multiple monitors if the user has enabled workspaces across multiple monitors. A feature that isn't on by default but which as far as I know still exists.

EG your window gets to big and suddenly everything disappears on monitor 2 and 3 because your universe now switched to workspace 2.

The traditional arrangement for gnome where changing workspace only effects the primary monitor is possibly the worst thing about gnome. It turns a secondary monitor into a singular big bucket of windows you must manage manually as if virtual desktops had never been invented. It is a complete failure of design.

* There is a simple way to allow both usages without a configuration switch that provides users with an obvious mental model and a simple metaphor

An actually competent design that transparently allows both independent workspaces and workspaces across all monitors looks like this.

my first ascii pager

M1 [1][2][3][4][] M2 [1][2][3][4][] M1 [1][2][3][4][]

Locked pagers stay where you put them unlocked change together.

Size issues.

Expecting windows not to expand content arbitrarily may be better handled by just not tiling windows with a small maximum size. Note hints on minimum size and maximum size have existed forever.

Windows with medium maximum sizes can be expanded to $SIZE in a tiled layout but if the space is too plentiful some of that "tile" can be left empty with the app sized appropriately within it. For instance a pdf document on a large monitor may want to be as tall as it can be but only so wide.

If no hints are set one can also expect window to intelligently display content within a reasonable size like how competent web pages don't draw their content arbitrarily wide.

* Concerns about gnome specific designs and usability within other environments.

If gnome app developers rely on gnome specific affordances in other environments they may inherently look or feel like shit. At minimum work should be shared between other environments and existing affordances like WM_NORMAL_HINTS ought to be used where they can be for compatibility.

* Reasonable expectations

If this is adopted multiple monitors across desktops will be unusable thus gnome will simply disable and deprecate that feature.

Gnome apps will be designed in such a way as to work poorly in other environments.

Gnome developers response to any issues will be that you should be using Gnome.

KDE developers will 6 months later support whatever gnome did.

Dynamic tiling window managers like dwm and xmonad can do this. They default to a 'master/stack' layout but you can change the layout algorithm. You esentially have a 'master' window and a stack of secondary windows. You can promote a window with super+enter and it gets swapped into the master area.

There are some autotiling scripts for i3 that can emulate this behavior as well.