On Desktop GUI Minimalism

And, yes, I managed to bind slrnpull with GNU's avoiding a huge chunk of time. And, SLRN was much faster. On hackability, I don't care, awk/sed/sh it's my glue, and perl+CPAN for a big task.

In the end, it's being run on a batch basis with cron, so I have the ultimate Unix tools: let the tools do the hard work themselves with scripts, so you just ignore anything else and focus on your current task. Mails, news posts and RSS's are currently managed in the background, a single script will download and upload all the data.

The author mentions this design in passing but I think it is contextually important to understand why people might like this at all so I'll share what I appreciate about tiling window managers:

The appeal, for me, is the inflexibility. Tiling window managers and their often bundled 'tags' approach to window management offer a simplicity that is comforting in its constancy to me, the user. To sum it up, they make me feel 'at home' using my computer. Comfy goes beyond familiarity though.

I never have a mess of windows to deal with across my monitors, where I'm constantly needing to look at a taskbar, minimizing and un-minimizing programs (or looking through a stack of 'shaded' windows in the author's case). Each of my frequently used programs has its own tag, or shares a tag (visually as a tile) with other programs. While the programs I have open at any one time change, their locations don't. Everything in its right place, I always know what is where. I switch between all programs directly with ease, with no intermediate interruptions to occupy my attention, my hands never leaving my keyboard. No 'looking' for stuff. Switches happen instantly because there are no transitions or any other forms of detectable latency (and for that matter, no compositor either). Combine all this with extensive use of scratchpads for ad-hoc and exploratory tasks and all the bases have been covered. Comfy.

In floating systems, partially covered windows are useless and usually avoided: either you want to see everything, or you minimize the window. The few times one tries to actually keep a partially covered window (i.e. show only the last few lines of a terminal visible), the UX is terrible because as soon as you switch focus the visibility of the entire stack of windows changes, and you need to click around/Alt-Tab to restore the previous layout. For this reason, 99% of people just have a single window that's maximized per workspace.

Tiling window managers could be decent if they were a core experience, but in reality no one develops apps for them so you always have some popup that spawns and fills half your screen.

The major shortcoming of both is that they only work in rectangular, desktop-sized screens. Mobile UIs avoid both, and default to single-window-always-maximized, which still isn't good enough.

Scrollable tiling managers, however, would be the bee's knees: windows are laid out on an infinitely scrollable horizontal layout, which would also easily replicate the common side-by-side layout "power users" often rely on. There are some niche experiments like PaperWM, but they haven't ironed out the UX for some reason: if they just made the entire layout scrollable by panning on your touchpad/mobile screen, it would instantly be better than anything we have today, and free us from the tyranny of window management. Additionally, it would work with both our widescreen, cinema-sized desktop monitors, and mobile devices.

(I have never used it and memory might fail me, but I seem to remember Palm webOS devices had this scrollable "card" layout system which people seemed to like a lot. See https://www.palmtotal.com/sites/www.palmtotal.com/files/imag...)

But how? What were you doing that involved window placement or positioning that "makes you more productive"? I just don't see how these activities, in the context of doing day-to-day work, could shave off more than a few minutes a day.

"Significantly" implies to me some double-digit percentage increase in the ability to accomplish tasks, and I just can't see how a window manager could possibly be responsible for such a thing.