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Rethinking Window Management

blogs.gnome.org

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Re: Rethinking Window Management

#81

Post by nektro »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #65

Clearly I am a very simple person, and I don't get all these window management wars. Almost all my workflows either involve one maximised windows, two windows side by side, or occasionally one smaller windowed floating on top of another. Linux does that for me by default. You can get the float on top in Windows with some 3re party tools, although it isn't as nicely integrated. What is everyone doing that needs someth…

yeah same, i3 does this for me perfectly. the only nit i would give it is that i wish the list of window tiles made it a little more apparent the borders, like including app icons or something like that

Re: Rethinking Window Management

#82

Post by [deleted] »

generalizations wrote: post #6

With a bit more work to not surprise the user and not break the window organization (e.g. the user really wanted these two windows next to each other), this mosaic paradigm could actually be really cool. Looking forward to see how it develops. If the kinks are worked out I may very well switch over from i3. > As you open more windows, the existing windows move aside to make room for the new ones. If a new window does…

[deleted]

Re: Rethinking Window Management

#84

Post by kergonath »

dugmartin wrote: post #13

I've been using i3 (within the larger Regolith package) for a few years now and its hard for me to non-tiling WMs now. However I do think there would be a lot of improvements, especially with large desktop monitors. One idea I had would be to have a window manager only have a single main window in each desktop and then scaled down windows around the border on the desktop, like the TV in Idiocracy ( https://www.sounda…

This sounds a bit like the Stage Manager thing in newer macOS versions. Except that they do this with groups which can have more than one window.

Re: Rethinking Window Management

#85

Post by mulmen »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #24
low_tech_punk wrote: post #8

On the other side of the problem is how modern applications waste screen real-estate with empty space, bloated menus, and poor typography. The application designers also need to adopt responsive layout to make sure the app provides the right amount of information using provided space. I hope a deeper rethink can consider the user's end goal being task management rather than window management. Maybe something in the s…

I think modern SW is less thoughtful because it's easier to change and monitors have grown. Back in the day it was tough to make changes after the fact and screens were tiny. Screen real estate was more precious so you better put some thought into the layout. It's like- modern large screens create more wasteful bloated applications which need larger screens... The new Outlook for example: I have the standard Windows…

The industry has also grown and the barriers to entry have dropped. The people making applications simply don't know or care about good design.

Re: Rethinking Window Management

#86

Post by vially »

ikekkdcjkfke wrote: post #68

Can someone please make a window manager that fits linux? Flat, no animations, super performant, no rounded corners, no shading, pixelated icons. Never understood how all the linux desktops are so ugly and laggy

sway does all those things very well: https://swaywm.org/

Re: Rethinking Window Management

#87

Post by mulmen »

kaetemi wrote: post #58

That mosaic concept sounds terrible. All the windows moving whenever a new window opens? That just sounds very annoying and very bad for my spatial memory. Things should just stay where I left them.

Imagine a desk in a windy park. Maybe the next innovation from the Gnome devs can be a "paperweight" you can drag onto your windows to keep them from blowing away.

Re: Rethinking Window Management

#88

Post by pushfoo »

snide wrote: post #23

For Gnome users, I really enjoy using Pop Shell (the window manager from Pop OS) as a tiling window manager. It doesn't exactly solve the problems with TWMs that this post discusses, but I often run into folks who don't know that you can use a lot of the bits from Pop OS in generic Gnome. I made a video about how to set it up if anyone is curious. The series was aimed at beginners, so feel to hop around if you just w…

For any readers who can't watch a video at the moment:

1. To be precise, Pop Shell is an extension for Gnome, not a separate window manager 2. It's available pre-packaged on Fedora, Arch, and Manjaro 3. It's easy to install from source on other distros

Install instructions & source available here: 1. https://support.system76.com/articles/pop-shell/ 2. https://github.com/pop-os/shell

I use it as a daily driver on Debian 11. It's the best balance of tiling and "normal" desktop UI I've found so far.

Re: Rethinking Window Management

#89

Post by greggyb »

dpc_01234 wrote: post #18

Since there's going to be a lot of tiling WM users looking: what's the best way to get tiling WM and all the convenience of a "full blown WM like Gnome": things like Network Manager applet, bluetooth control, audio etc. all just few clicks away.

XFCE is super modular. You can turn off individual components. You can enable any program to start with the XFCE session.

So, for example, disable xfdesktop and xfwm; enable other window manager of your choice. Then, when you run xfce4-session via any mechanism you get all of XFCE, but with another window manager. You can pull up xfce4-settings manager to handle all system settings as you would in any other XFCE session.

I am pretty sure that LXDE/LXQT allows this sort of modularity as well. I have no clue about KDE and Gnome.

Of particular note, you can combine XFCE's panel applet with a tiling window manager. So then you can keep an application menu and notification area (with associated notification settings) from XFCE with an arbitrary window manager.

Re: Rethinking Window Management

#90

Post by akira2501 »

eddd-ddde wrote: post #71
ikekkdcjkfke wrote: post #68

Can someone please make a window manager that fits linux? Flat, no animations, super performant, no rounded corners, no shading, pixelated icons. Never understood how all the linux desktops are so ugly and laggy

https://dwm.suckless.org/

dwm is great. I took it and ripped all the tiling manager code out of it and turned it into a generic window manager. What has kept me using it all these years is the "window move" and "window resize" system that fell out of this change.

Hold down ALT and CLICK1 on a window, _anywhere_ on that window, and you go into "window move" mode. No need to seek out the "titlebar", just click and move.

Hold down ALT and CLICK3 on a window, _anywhere_ on that window, and you go into "window resize" mode. No need to seek out the "corner edge", just click and it resizes the window.

With just that I can entirely rearrange my desktop with almost no effort and in very little time. It becomes second nature very quickly, and the need for "forced tiling" basically disappears. The problem with WMs isn't the layout strategy, it's the lack of user optimized layout controls.

I've been using this hacked up WM for 15 years. I will use this until I'm dead. I have yet to find anything which I find superior.

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