Hacker News Reader

Comment by hankmander | Hacker News Reader

The tiling window manager wasn't invented yet? All of these screenshots look like floating window hell. Thank god we live in the future!

View on HN

ratpoison was started in 2000, I think... inspired by this:

http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/inspiration.html

I've been using it since around 2003 or 2004...

Except I don't use the tiling stuff. I like to live in a kind of retro future. My laptop has a retina display that I mostly use for full screen black xterms with a font about the size to fit 80 characters.

The first version of Windows used a tiling window manager (or whatever that sort of thing is called on Windows.)

Wasn't that just a technological workaround, though? The hardware couldn't support overlapping windows.

Back then the (usual) hardware didn't support anything; the Xserver just wrote into some 100KByte of video memory, one bit per pixel. The X server had to deal with overlapping, and could.

Only top level application windows were tiled. Dialog windows were floating above them and they were overlapping.

There was no need for hardware support because windows were not buffered, they repainted itself when the system told them to do it.

It was at least partly due to Apple claiming ownership of overlapping windows.

According to "Barbarians led by Bill Gates" this was an intentional choice justified by studies of number of clicks required to perform some tasks.

Great book, btw.

There was at least Ion and Ratpoison (mentioned elsewhere ITT).

What's in dmr's drawterm looks pretty tiled to me.

That's acme, Plan 9's answer to emacs that does a really good job of managing tiled (text-only) "windows". It also served as an inspiration to the wmii tiling window manager on Linux

rtlwm was written and working around '87. It even has its own entry in the X11 icon font.

fvwm could be tiled.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com