Rethinking Window Management

I honestly don't know how someone could do much of anything in a "single window" on a 27" iMac screen. (Anything beyond, say, watching a movie or the like.)

On a laptop, sure, to a point. But these drive in theater style displays? Not quite sure how that works. Maybe it's great for video editing, but the screen is so large, and the eye can really focus on just a small portion of it, just seems like a lot of wasted space.

For example, I have this in a browser window, on my 27", with the text box, at, say, 6" wide by 2" tall, is roughly centered on the screen, about 30% down. The unexpanded text area has, I'd say, 6" of "margin" on the top, 8-10" on each side, and similar amount to the bottom. (Arguably it's a bit too hight right now for me.)

Not the window, mind, the text entry box (which could be expanded, but I don't). So, I'm easily "wasting" over 90% of my display right now. If it was "full screen", it would be crammed in the upper left corner. I'd either have to chronically cock my head, of simply shift the entire display over to put it in a comfortable position.

> the GNOME fullscreen mode mentioned in the blog post is identical

after being given a macbook pro for work, i can't stop thinking that gnome developers/designers people are just people that didn't manage to get hired by Apple, and just keep copying mac os over and over again.

I have been using a tiling WM since ion2, but I’ve used other OS WMs too. It’s hard to take this article seriously when it talks about tiling window manager limitations but fails to mention one big negative for tiling WMs: they assume I want to see the whole window all of the time.

Overlapping windows let me put my terminal over the top of my browser. I can overlap and conceal, say, the left nav bar of a documentation website while still letting me see the body of the docs.

    + - - - - +
    |terminal |- - - +
    |         | docs |
    |         |      |
    + - - - - +      |
           + - - - - +

Focus follows mouse (which you get in macOS, albeit only for scroll) means I can interact with the lower window without bringing it to the foreground. I’ve done this when my employment has forced me to use macOS, and it works well and much better than a tiling WM.

There are extensions to disable any kind of animation. I use the Windows key to open the app list/search and hot keys to move between virtual desktops (activities, but I use the la name). Nothing moves and resizes on my desktop.

I agree with you.

1) Always remember location and size hashed by monitor(s) arrangement.

2) Get rid of "Maximize" and go back to "Zoom" where I can switch between 2 positions/sizes: one is the smallest window that will fit and layout everything perfectly without scroll bars, and the other is point 1) remembered location/size.

3) Simple floating panels/palettes/icons. Nothing jarring. One menu bar:

  *  Application  File  Edit  View  Help           Wed 3:59 PM  ⏻
  Software Update...                                   Switch User
  -                                                    Log Out...
  File Browser                                         -
  Web Browser                                          Restart
  Text Edit                                            Shut Down
  Terminal