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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

The "half-maximized" feature sounds great, and one of the things that I feel like no one has right, still. Windows has actually gotten pretty good, surprisingly (drag to corners to get a quarter screen window, drag to sides to get half screen). Gnome is clumsier than I'd like. I really would love a window manager that handles tiling well, but doesn't require complete buy-in to a fully tiled concept. I doubt I'll be going back to Window Maker for this (I used it up until switching briefly to Enlightenment and then on to various Gnome standard window managers....Sawfish, and some others), but it seems like it's reasonably well thought out implementation.

Also, I find it really funny when a project has been around for decades, and has been regarded as stable for nearly as long, and still hasn't done a 1.0 release.

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KDE has drag to corner to get quarter screen window for a long time.

I've been a kde user for a couple of years now and I had no idea this existed...

Unfortunately in Window Maker the left/right edges of the screen move a window to another virtual desktop (by default), so this would have to be limited to the top or bottom edges which do not seem to have an action tied to them so far.

There is also drag to edge to get half of the screen. (only for left/right edges)

And you can left click and middle click the maximize button on a window title bar to maximize it on the vertical and horizontal axises only. Combined with edge snapping making it easy to move a window on only one axis at that point, you can set up a few column tiles that way very easily.

Funny memory: I've been a KDE developer for 12 or 13 years. I think one of my first patches ever was a fix for the window manager to restore to correct window geometry when cancelling a partially maximized state using the restore action. A friend of mine was using the above feature to set up tiled text editors and I wanted to fix it for him.

> Windows has actually gotten pretty good, surprisingly (drag to corners to get a quarter screen window, drag to sides to get half screen)

Holy shit on a shingle... how did I not know about this magic incantation!

Even better then: try the Win key + arrow keys.

And shift+win+arrows to kick it over your multiple monitors.

With those two features now in Windows (for a while) I could finally drop my autohotkey windowing script.

I knew about and use the hell out of the Win+Arrow combo... but I didn't know you could drag to corners/sides to get the same effect.

Always nice to have alternatives - and I'm always dragging stuff around to different windows so it'll be nice to not have to drag, drop and then window key stuff.

I'm going to plug my dispswitch program (https://github.com/tom-seddon/dispswitch - Windows only. You run it from a hotkey manager such as AutoHotKey). It does a better job of preserving monitor-relative size and position when you've got monitors with work rects of different sizes.

For tiling windows, try align_window3 (https://github.com/tom-seddon/align_window3 - again, it's for Windows, and use AutoHotKey). It gives you more portrait-friendly options than the Windows default stuff.

> I really would love a window manager that handles tiling well, but doesn't require complete buy-in to a fully tiled concept.

I use OpenBox and awesomewm together. I can tile if I want, but I also have access to a more traditional approach.

Because of OpenBox's configuration of everything, I can often link the two together to do fun things like, tile all windows equally around my active window, that I can drag and resize as I like.

> Windows has actually gotten pretty good, surprisingly (drag to corners to get a quarter screen window, drag to sides to get half screen).

Add a dash of Taekwindow to the mix, and you'll have everything you need:

http://taekwindow.net/

You can use window button + arrows to attach windows to corners.

Yes, I know :). Taekwindow adds X11-like behaviour with ALT+left/right click drag to move/resize. Also let's you have scroll-under-cursor instead of scroll-focused-window behaviour.

So it's entirely complementary, and you can customise to your liking.

I use a similar application AltDrag. I can't live without it. I of course set it to the Win Key instead of Alt, as Alt key is used heavily in Blender and some other of the software that I use.

https://stefansundin.github.io/altdrag/

use Divvy ( Mac, Windows )

You get granular ad-hoc tiling that fits the need you have when you have it.

http://mizage.com/divvy/

The video looks pretty sweet. Expensive though.

If this let you specify the grid settings using the keyboard instead of requiring me to use the mouse, I'd love it. Oh, and I'm on Linux, as well...

Personally I find Magnet[1] (for Mac) to be wonderful, it moves your windows around to halves, thirds, and two-thirds presets with either dragging or keyboard shortcuts.

[1]: http://magnet.crowdcafe.com

That looks great. I love that it supports thirds.

AwesomeWM is both a tiling and floating WM. It has this feature (including snap to corner for 1/4). Awesome is a window manager framework allowing its users to be pretty much anything they want.

(disclaimer, I am a contributor)

And it is default WM on Gobolinux 016 (016.1 being in the works right now).

Moom for Mac is great with near perfect functionality. Hover over the "Fullscreen" button and you can select by a customizable grid for size and placement. Also quick half sized options.

I deeply love Moom because you can set it up to be tiled-with-gaps, which is ideal if you're still occasionally using your mouse to move stuff around.

Argh! Yet another incredible piece of software I never heard of until stumbling across the posts here in a HN thread. Why is finding these great pieces of software so hard!

Thanks for the tip on it!

Another fan here. There are other small utilities that provide the same functionality, but Moom is best to me because it doesn't hijack screen edges/corners, preventing accidental maximizing and playing more nicely with a workflow with an even mix of maximized and odd-sized windows.

KDE had it many years ago.

drag to corners to get a quarter screen window, drag to sides to get half screen

Incidentally, that behaviour was one of the first things I had to figure out how to turn off in Windows, because I just wanted to move the window there; I did NOT want to resize it. I found it quite annoying.

Cinnamon has similar "drag to edge" tiling as Windows, and you can also configure keyboard shortcuts for it - I have win+arrow keys configured to move windows to the edges/corners.

On that last statement of yours, keep this as a rule of thumb:

If an API, 1.0 means stable. If an application, 1.0 means fully featured (as dictated by the author or community).

Why the downvote?

No idea, but in general, there are no general rules for version numbers.

Well, of course. It's just a common pattern that I've observed (mostly in the npm packages and linux cli tools).

Spectacle for Mac has this feature, too.

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