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Comment by delaminator

9 days ago

I use i3-wm

I never resize a window with its border.

I never minimize a weindow.

I sometimes move a window to a different panel but it snaps to the width / height of the column.

Overlapping windows is perhaps the worst GUI paradigm - it's like the first thing someone thought of for 640 x 480 screens.

Let it go.

11 comments

delaminator

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pjmlp  9 days ago

Tiling window managers used to be a thing in the old days, they predate the invention of overlapping windows, there is a reason it is only a minority that reaches out to them nowadays.

  • zamalek  9 days ago

    Tilings are no better or no worse than floating. There are many users who would benefit from them (people who typically keep all their windows maximized), but have had literally zero exposure two them due to MacOS and Windows.

    Complaints about lack of window snapping in MacOS vs Windows, a loose copy of tiling, are consistent across the internet. If MacOS and Windows had native tiling support, you'd see a fight fiercer than tabs vs. spaces.

    The reason floating windows are used is because "that's the way it is done." Windows 95 wowed the world and established the status quo.

    Not to mention the direction that the likes of Paper and Niri are going, these are things that very few users get to experience and therefore couldn't possibly have an informed decision on what they prefer.

    • nickjj  9 days ago

      > Not to mention the direction that the likes of Paper and Niri are going, these are things that very few users get to experience and therefore couldn't possibly have an informed decision on what they prefer.

      niri is great because it gives you the best of all worlds.

      Scrolling by default but you can easily float and tile things as needed. It feels so intuitive for how I use computers.

      I've created a few posts and videos on using niri while going over my workflows in https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-is-niri-this-good-live-de... and https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/day-to-day-window-management-....

      Having used Windows for 25 years, there's no chance I'll ever go back. This environment is already substantially better. That's after tricking Windows out with virtual desktops, global hotkeys, window positioning tools, launchers, multiple clipboards, heavily WSL 2 driven, etc..

      I tried to switch a few times over the last decade but was always blocked by hardware issues on this machine, those blockers are gone now.

  • BoingBoomTschak  9 days ago

    That reason being that there is a minority of people who reach out to anything instead of just using what they're given. Compounded by baby duck syndrome, of course.

  • delaminator  9 days ago

    Not in a GUI though. Sun Windows was overlapping, GEM was overlapping and almost everything else since then.

    I'm on a 5120x2160 monitor and tiling is super perfect.

    Can't recommend it enough.