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Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

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Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#101

Post by nickjj »

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…

> - virtual desktop keyboard shortcuts to quickly switch to a numbered Virtual Desktop and move windows to them (I have a autohotkey script for this), but would be nice for it to be built-in to this.

You can do this with DexPot (https://www.dexpot.de/?lang=en) and even send windows to a specific virtual desktop. It uses i3's key binds by default.

On Windows you're better off trying to find specific functionality from i3 across different tools.

For example, you can also use http://keypirinha.com/ to launch apps by fuzzy matching. In some ways it's better than d-menu and in other ways it's worse, but it's a decent tool.

And you can also use AutoHotKey to remap and set global hotkeys (as you may do in i3's config).

The only missing thing is actually tiling windows unfortunately.

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#102

Post by virtualwhys »

badsectoracula wrote: post #56
TickleSteve wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

i3 isn't really a Windows click-click-click style UI; you do most everything with the keyboard, including % based resizing, converting tiles to tabs or stacks, moving tiles from one section or virtual desktop to another, etc.

It's really quite a powerful and easily configurable tool, so much so that I consider it to be an absolutely indispensable part of my day-to-day computing experience (working on a Mac, for example, is just depressing in comparison).

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#103

Post by cjarrett »

criddell wrote: post #81
kryogen1c wrote: post #72

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://doc…

For Windows 10, you probably don't need Desktops anymore. If you click on the task view button on the toolbar, one of the options at the top is to add virtual desktops. You cycle between them with ctrl-win-left and ctrl-win-right.

Win+Tab opens up an overlay that allows you add a desktop as well.

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#105

Post by _x5tx »

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…

Honest question here: what are the advantages over fancy zones? I'm a linux i3 user and want to give a try on windows with fancy zones, I can give workspacer a try as well.

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#106

Post by ndarwincorn »

nickjj wrote: post #100
ndarwincorn wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah I realize how I misunderstood/how that was poorly worded, but I'm well aware of how i3 works, thanks. This may come as a shock to you, but some of us prefer our highly-tailored pre-configured tiling setups to the ad-hoc interaction that is i3.

> This may come as a shock to you, but some of us prefer our highly-tailored pre-configured tiling setups to the ad-hoc interaction that is i3. Yes, that's why i3 and other wms exist on Linux and everyone is happy using the tool they prefer. I'm more upset about the title of the post being clickbait because like you said, some people prefer different styles of tiled window managers. Having it defined as "tiling windo…

Probably closer to 80% :).

I get the baited feeling. But you know as well as me that any sort of tiling interaction with Windows beyond snap left/snap right is progress.

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#107

Post by criddell »

cjarrett wrote: post #103
criddell wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Windows 10, you probably don't need Desktops anymore. If you click on the task view button on the toolbar, one of the options at the top is to add virtual desktops. You cycle between them with ctrl-win-left and ctrl-win-right.

Win+Tab opens up an overlay that allows you add a desktop as well.

That's another way of getting to the task view.

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#108

Post by msla »

efdee wrote: post #21
boarnoah wrote: post #3

> PowerToys What a project name :P

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

Millennials are in their mid-30s by now.

Boomers are retired, Xers are the corporate old guard, and the up-and-comers right out of college are Generation Z (Zoomers) or whatever they come to be called.

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#109

Post by y4mi »

jowsie wrote: post #92
y4mi wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do they know the powertoys heritage though? also: i'm not sure i agree with <19 yrs old people being ... "old"

Am millennial. Fully aware of the PowerToys heritage. I used to run the win95 explorer.exe on Windows 98 back in the day along with a bunch of PowerToys tweaks. Millennial were born 1981-1996 ;) There's no <19 year old millennial's left, I'm afraid.

I confused millennia with generation x... You're right if course! I can never keep these terms straight

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#110

Post by laumars »

rickbutton wrote: post #97
JerwuQu wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just downloaded it and I have some pretty specific/opinionated requests already :P I like it when the config file is explicit - as in that there are no defaults outside of what is specified in the config file. This way it's very easy for a new user (like me) to edit things like keybinds, colors, etc. without having to basically recreate the default config to then edit it. Also, since I'm an i3 user, I'd like if there…

on default config: yeah, I'm not sure what the best story is here. I would like the out of the box experience to be nice, and I want to be able to configure anything, but I also want to be able to ship nice improvements to the defaults without making all users update their own config. For example, I just pushed a commit that adds a default ignore for a new start menu process in 1903. If I place that ignore in the "te…

The way most software I've seen resolve this is to have a defaults config file and a user config file. defaults is defined by the application maintainers and the user config overrides any settings in the defaults.

So you can do updates to the defaults but if users wanted to specify specific customisations those would be preserved. Also users can browser the defaults config and copy/paste chunks of that config into the user config file.

Those files are often named differently and/or located in different parts of the file system hierarchy; but the concept is the same.

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