A Tiling Desktop Environment • Hacker News Board

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#31

Post by grzm » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 3:03 AM UTC

wmf wrote: post #29

tambourine_man wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is that Apple kind of invented the overlapping windows paradigm, the Xerox Alto didn’t have that concept, IIRC. Also, dragging something from the desktop and dropping on a floating window was a major breakthrough, which is kind of incompatible with a split screen model. Personally, on small screens like the original Mac, I think the floating/overlapping WM worked perfectly. On a 30” however, it’s a bit silly.

The original iPad had 4x the resolution of the original Mac yet the iPad was full screen only and now supports some kind of tiling. Based on some historical writings I wonder if overlapping windows were a gimmick that became the default.

The iPad is also single-app, and touch based. This is significantly different from multi-window/multi-app with a precision pointing device like a mouse. The windowing use-cases aren't the same.

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#32

Post by agumonkey » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 3:04 AM UTC

smhenderson wrote: post #23

opencl wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Windows has had a basic level of built-in window tiling functionality for a decade now. You can resize windows to half or a quarter of the screen either with keyboard shortcuts or dragging the window to a side or corner. It works pretty well.

Tiling and cascading Windows was available in Win 3.0. And it was available to MDI apps all that time as well so a lot longer than a decade.

yeah I was a bit shocked to finally understand the purpose of that feature 20 years after the fact

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#33

Post by Aelius » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 3:05 AM UTC

All you linux veterans may cringe at it, but maybe check out my dotfiles. I have spent years cultivating a complete DE experience around dwm. It shouldn't be too hard to drop in your wm of choice.

I have used it with HiDPI but only briefly, so that may still be imperfect.

https://github.com/AeliusSaionji/dotfiles

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#34

Post by agumonkey » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 3:05 AM UTC

opencl wrote: post #19

wyclif wrote: post #7

I've never understood why macOS has never included the functionality of, say, Divvy or chunkwm. I'd like to easily be able to tile my desktop via a keyboard command. Also, I've never quite understood what macOS people have against snapping the edges of windows to each other or the edge of the screen. Sometimes I want to divide the workspace into 3 or 4 windows and maximise my use of screen real estate. It's trivial t…

Even Windows has had a basic level of built-in window tiling functionality for a decade now. You can resize windows to half or a quarter of the screen either with keyboard shortcuts or dragging the window to a side or corner. It works pretty well.

window snaping IIRC, which is to me, the most interesting UI idea MS had since win95. It is damn intuitive and efficient.

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#35

Post by tambourine_man » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 3:24 AM UTC

wmf wrote: post #29

tambourine_man wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is that Apple kind of invented the overlapping windows paradigm, the Xerox Alto didn’t have that concept, IIRC. Also, dragging something from the desktop and dropping on a floating window was a major breakthrough, which is kind of incompatible with a split screen model. Personally, on small screens like the original Mac, I think the floating/overlapping WM worked perfectly. On a 30” however, it’s a bit silly.

The original iPad had 4x the resolution of the original Mac yet the iPad was full screen only and now supports some kind of tiling. Based on some historical writings I wonder if overlapping windows were a gimmick that became the default.

The original iPad screen physical size was actually rather similar to that of the original Mac.

And apps often felt way too big on it. The calculator was so comically stretched that they couldn’t bring themselves to ship it.

Full screen only is a simple yet overly contraining model.

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#36

Post by celrod » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 3:24 AM UTC

furgooswft13 wrote: post #28

I'm just here to shamelessly shill for Notion (not-ion), though it is probably the furthest tiling WM from this guy's wants (ease of setting up shiny things). I swear there are still dozens of active users. It's tiling is like i3 except it uses manual layouts instead of dynamic. So when you create yet another xterm window it does not rearrange all the other tiles on your screen, it just creates a new tab in the curre…

I use gnome-terminal instead of xterm in i3. gnome-terminal supports tabs (control+shift+t), so I can easily choose between a new tab versus a new window.

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#37

Post by csb6 » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 3:27 AM UTC

I have been using https://github.com/miromannino/miro-windows-manager for several months now. It is a plugin for Hammersppoon on macOS that lets you resize and organize windows using the keyboard.

It’s worked really well for my set-up (can make windows fullscreen, take up 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 of vertical or horizontal space of the screen).

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#38

Post by alskdj21 » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 3:35 AM UTC

This was also my experience. I was using i3 for a year but things still weren't working the way I wanted it. Stumbled upon i3-gnome (https://github.com/csxr/i3-gnome) and this maybe the current solution for this problem.

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#39

Post by colordrops » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 4:10 AM UTC

wyclif wrote: post #7

I've never understood why macOS has never included the functionality of, say, Divvy or chunkwm. I'd like to easily be able to tile my desktop via a keyboard command. Also, I've never quite understood what macOS people have against snapping the edges of windows to each other or the edge of the screen. Sometimes I want to divide the workspace into 3 or 4 windows and maximise my use of screen real estate. It's trivial t…

There's a great piece of software called Amethyst that gives you decent window tiling that can be configured to function similarly to XMonad and other window managers. It's really just using the current window manager and automates window size and placement, but works well enough.

Re: A Tiling Desktop Environment

#40

Post by adrusi » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 4:18 AM UTC

furgooswft13 wrote: post #28

I'm just here to shamelessly shill for Notion (not-ion), though it is probably the furthest tiling WM from this guy's wants (ease of setting up shiny things). I swear there are still dozens of active users. It's tiling is like i3 except it uses manual layouts instead of dynamic. So when you create yet another xterm window it does not rearrange all the other tiles on your screen, it just creates a new tab in the curre…

With sway (Wayland port of i3) you can set "workspace_layout tabbed" to have the default container be tabbed, and also top level splits that are created by moving a window out of a tabbed container be tabbed. I think i3 works like this too, but I don't remember well.

The i3 model requires building a strong intuition for how to solve broken layouts, and it can be frustrating until you know how. But once you figure it out it's automatic. It's not for everyone, but a lot of people end up liking it a lot.