I turned gnome-shell into a tiling window manager

It's still a piece of crap, though.

It tiles windows, not terminal sessions.

I think more people should write similar extensions or even new window managers. In my opinion, “traditional” window management is quirky, even if we've all grown used to it. Resizing and moving windows, for example, are painful given how you need to click on small specific areas to carry them out. Most window managers on Linux have overcome with a combination of a key press and mouse click allowing you to move/resize by clicking anywhere in the window. With a tiling window manager you usually have some keyboard shortcut to do it.

Still, none of those approaches solve the problem in all situations. Managing windows can be “uncomfortable”. Sure you can make use of workspaces, or tags (à la dwm, I think the tag paradigm is beautiful) or whatnot, but you don't want to think about the act of switching windows. Have you ever found yourself alt-tabbing through a pile of windows and be annoyed by not getting to the right window easily enough (“Oh, drat, I pressed Tab one too many times”). Whenever I have to use OS X, I press the Exposé shortcut for almost every context switch.

So yeah, this is kind of extension is more than welcome and others should continue to innovate. If nothing else good comes out of Gnome 3, at least it would have pushed people to think about their interaction with the interface.

Sometimes i wish xmonad had 3d transitions between layouts. That's probably the only appeal of a gnome shell extension

At a largely Windows-based shop I installed Linux on my system and had Gnome set up with some fancy 3d-box transitions. I got some startled wows from my coworkers when they were helping me with something over my shoulder and I switched desktops.

However, I always found myself reducing the transition time bit by bit, until I eventually got rid of the transition. When I'm in the zone and coding I might be checking docs or some output on one workspace, and I want to switch workspaces and begin typing without the feedback delay. I already have the next 20 keystrokes planned out, and I'd rather be rate limited by my fingers than my WM.