Hacker News Reader

Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Dude writes a massive article on monitors but Willy nilly strews his windows across the display, with random sized gaps between them. Gives me a bit of a chuckle - to each their own but I obsess over getting every pixel of real estate my display offers me, so I always thought it was odd to peer over a coworker's shoulder and see something like the first image in this blog.

View on HN

I used to be like that. Then I switched to a 40" 4k TV as a monitor a year (or two?) ago. You quickly find that it works best less as a small display into some large space (as you might view a virtual desktop view) and more like a chunk of the wall in front of you has become much more dynamic.

It's much harder to see it all at once, so you end up just treating it as a free floating space to organize things, much like a real desktop (do you layer all your items our to maximize used space on physical desks as well?).

While not working, I'll spend most the time with a browser window utilizing slightly more than a quarter of the screen towards the bottom left, and not much else, maybe some small transient file folder windows.

While working, I keep the browser, but I add a few large terminal windows. Usually one mostly upper center, bottom right, but the upper center one might overlap other windows slightly (because why not? I can make it large without slight overlap and very little loss of passive usefulness of other windows).

It's fairly liberating. I now view tight control and maximizing utilized space as a response to lack of space, which is no longer my problem. In the beginning, I wasn't sure if I was going to regret this, and was looking for utilities to set screen areas that I could maximize to, or save presets for certain applications. Then I just let go, and it's been wonderful ever since.

If you're interested, I still recommend the TV I got (or something better maybe now). It's got low input lag (~13ms) and does 60hz at 4k, all for about $500 at Amazon[1] (I think it was ~$400 when I got it on sale).

1: https://www.amazon.com/VIZIO-D40-D1-Class-Array-Smart/dp/B01...

> It's much harder to see it all at once, so you end up just treating it as a free floating space to organize things, much like a real desktop (do you layer all your items our to maximize used space on physical desks as well?).

If it wouldn't take ages to properly align paper with a 1mm border but they would magically align themselves - yes of course I would :)

Not that I work a lot with paper anymore, but I see no advantage of not aligning stuff in the real world just like a tiling wm would...

> Not that I work a lot with paper anymore, but I see no advantage of not aligning stuff in the real world just like a tiling wm would...

That depends on how you like to switch windows. Virtual windows can do one thing that papers can't, they can magically move themselves in the Z space. If you size/space your windows so that no matter what Z order things are in, there is always part of every window visible, you can VERY quickly click on that part to bring that window to the front.

Yes, I know tiling WMs can give you awesome keybindings... but some people like using the mouse or work for shitty companies that don't allow WM installs.

The analogy breaks down a bit, because it's not easy to stretch papers to different sizes as needed. I used to do this much less often, either because it was maximized or it cut into the space I had allocated for something else. Now I'll just resize a terminal much larger temporarily if I'm looking at lohs where it's beneficial (but wouldn't be all that useful for coding sessions), or pop out a new browser winder to make it larger (a video of some sort, etc).

Since space is less constrained, the size of thugs ends up being much more fluid. Once you end up using many different sizes of things (do I still need ed to see that terminal while watching some video waiting for it to finish? Maybe the size is slightly different to account for that) spending time to accurately place everything very quickly hits diminishing returns past one or two core apps.

It would be a bit like having a large desk and then buying gigantic sheets of paper to write on because otherwise you would have wasted desk space.

Do the edges of the content fall under the bezel (i.e., get cut off by the frame)? I used to have that problem with 1080p TVs, so I switched back to monitors for everything other than entertainment.

No, it has a monitor mode where you get a full 3840 by 2160.

Tiling window managers are not the silver bullet they are often made out to be IMO.

I used tiling window managers for quite a while — two years at least, maybe even for four years.

There are several factors that made me abandon tiling window managers.

The main thing though is that I look at and work in a lot of different combinations of windows.

And often multiple of those windows are big enough that they wouldn’t tile together. But with floating windows I can easily drag them around so that the parts of current concern within each window are visible and I have a total overview.

When I was using tiling window managers I used to believe that I was being smart and efficient by doing so. It turned out for me that actually floating windows give me more freedom.

What matters, I found out, is not how efficiently I can pack windows on the screen to avoid “wasted space” (as tiling window managers help you do), but how easily I can rearrange arbitrarily windows to give me the total picture I need while I am thinking.

I use a MBP now, but I've never understood why a lot of macOS users seem to be happy doing that. Back when I was on Linux, I preferred how easy it was to use i3 or awesome or whatever WM would tile the windows so all the screen real estate maxed out according to the work layout I preferred at the time.

macOS' window management is still so remarkably bad. In fact it might even be worse than ever for me now; I used to be able to install some kind of "keep window afloat" hack, but the ability to do that disappeared with one of the version updates. I just try to keep everything in tmux these days and avoid the UI altogether.

There are a handful of nice window management tools, and chunkwm is a filing window manager for macOS

You should try Slate (https://github.com/jigish/slate), it's great for window management once it's set up. I have hotkeys for positioning windows top-, bottom-, left-, and right halves, move windows to the right or left monitor and for displaying a grid that let you define the size and position of the current window by marking an area in the grid. It needs the Accessibility API, though, which may be an issue if your employer doesn't allow sudo access on their computers. Here's my dotfile: https://github.com/Jonasmst/dotfiles/blob/master/.slate

Or if you want something with zero set up, use Spectacle https://www.spectacleapp.com/

Thanks, I hadn't heard of this and it's an interesting project. One problem, though, is that if you're like me and a heavy user of iTerm2/tmux, Spectacle seems a bit jittery while it's trying to match the terminal window to the desired window dimensions.

Or if you want to write your own WM from scratch, try https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon

Or if you want something close to i3, try https://koekeishiya.github.io/chunkwm/

Perhaps not everybody is obsessive about "maximizing space" in this diminishing returns regard?

I acknowledge that - though I'm being presumptive and calling that "failing to maximize tool effectiveness."

I have to stay organized because I have a dumb and chaotic brain. If I used the default osx windows management, er, "system" such as it were, I probably would get done a tenth of what I get done today on my Gnome setup.

The fact that Divvy is so popular makes me suspicious.

Personally, I find things to be easier for my brain when there's a clear space between windows. Not nearly as extreme as in the article, sure, but I felt sufficiently in need of window gaps that I actually hacked them into my StumpWM config back before I switched to herbstluftwm (which is - you guessed it - configured with gaps).

I was super into tiling window managers for awhile, but now I'm firmly in the floating camp.

My local optimum was reached when I started using virtual desktops, one for each window, with each window fullscreen. A fullscreen terminal +tmux is where I do most of my work.

I don't see it as any different than "Massive 8GB of RAM, but willy nilly allocates JS objects all over (with a GC!)". I always thought the main point of having increasing specs is to have the luxury of not needing to obsess over every byte, or pixel.

Nobody except Chuck Moore pushes every piece of hardware to 100% of its capacity at all times. It's always easier to get beefier hardware than to be perfectly strict at all times.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com