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

141–150 of 172 posts

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#141

Post by WorldMaker »

nailer wrote: post #22
nickjj wrote: post #20

I got REALLY excited when I read this title until I read the documentation and now I probably won't even bother testing it. If anyone is looking for an i3-like tiling window manager (a Linux tiling wm) Fanzy Zones isn't it. This one requires pre-setting a bunch of layouts up front, unlike i3 where you can just seamlessly open and move windows that auto-split as you go with zero window configuration up front. IMO the…

It's an Open Source project. Send a PR or a feature request: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/new?assignees=...

From the existing backlog, this is a close representation of the feature request: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/160

It's not exactly the "zero configuration" the parent wants, but it's close, and aligned with how some tiling managers work. (As the other arguments get into, tiling window manager is a wide field with a variety of solutions and opinions differ.)

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#143

Post by ukyrgf »

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.

They have absolutely ruined this in the past few years. It was once very snappy, and tiled everything perfectly on the screen. Then they made it scroll. Then they added "Timelines". Then they added a zoom out animation that doesn't respond to any of your Windows animation settings. Now, even on a high end computer, it will take you a full second before everything is zoomed out and tiled (with one final flash as it adds window titles and shifts everything around), and at least in my case has a probably 5% chance of crashing explorer.exe and needing even more time to re-launch.

This was the featured that made me go "okay, Windows 10 is doing some good things, I'll upgrade from 7", and now I hate it.

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#144

Post by badsectoracula »

virtualwhys wrote: post #102
badsectoracula wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 examp…

Yes i know that i3 has a lot of keyboard shortcuts, i'm saying what i'd expect it to also have in terms of mouse support - it isn't an either "this" or "that", it is both :-). One doesn't exclude the other.

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#145

Post by WorldMaker »

mc32 wrote: post #5
Spacemolte wrote: post #2

Looks really nice, but not a big fan of the name "Power Toys" - It makes me think it's some extension to powershell or a collection of powershell scripts that does something fancy.

Well it inherits the name from the Win95 days, some years before powershell became a thing. And “power” is a word borrowed from biz like power lunches and power walking, etc. just a happy play on words. I think it also borrows a bit from “Kai’s Power Tools”

"Power user" has been a computing term for decades, for someone that uses advanced features. (In this case you have toys for power users.)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/power_user

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#146

Post by Barrin92 »

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 has mouse support, you can resize windows (by default i believe it is mod + right mouse button), and i am fairly certain drag and drop will make it into the next release, if you want to use it there's already a PR on github to test it out.

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#147

Post by WorldMaker »

msla wrote: post #112

This doesn't look like what a Linux or BSD user would call a window manager. It looks more like a way to configure the MS-Windows window manager (that is, the graphical shell) to behave a bit more like i3 or xmonad in how it arranges windows on the screen. There's no real way to pry off MS-Windows and run anything else on top of the NT kernel, is there?

Microsoft themselves tried in Windows 8, when they thought they might actually have a chance to reinvent most of the graphical shell. The original UWP "world" (app composition model) involved a separate tiling window manager that a lot of people hated (I loved it, sigh). In Windows 8.1 that tiling window manager got rather capable allowing for any number of vertical splits and the Win32 desktop taking up what remains after the splits. In Windows 10 the last vestiges of that tiling window manager remain only in Tablet Mode and devolved back to only supporting one vertical split at a time, just managing two semi-maximized apps running more traditionally like the Win32 desktop mode.

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#148

Post by fiter »

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…

If you want to add the complexity of diff, you could do what Debian does[0][1].

[0] https://askubuntu.com/questions/365840/compare-differences-w...

[1] https://raphaelhertzog.com/2010/09/21/debian-conffile-config...

Re: Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager

#150

Post by michaelmrose »

simias wrote: post #78
tinus_hn wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Each wayland compositor is like a combination of X and a singular wm wherein the existing Wayland standard provides a framework for implementing rather than each person reinventing their own x alternative.
Post reply on HN