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Comment by pampa | Hacker News Reader

There are UIs on Linux (& *BSDs) that you cant get anywhere else - tiling window managers. I'd argue that a tiling WM is the greatest UI for a poweruser/programmer/devops. There is a learing curve, but once you memorize a few hotkeys you wont be able to go back to a floating windows mess.

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Why a tiling wm instead of tmux? The only thing I want to tile is my terminal anyways -- tiled GUIs generally don't work well and alt-tabbing through them is a better UX.

You probably answered your own question there. They might want to tile things other than a terminal.

I used to use Ion3 on a tiny Fujitsu Lifebook P1510D to divide the screen into quadrants containing things like a terminal (mostly used for IRC), Pidgin, a browser, and whatever videos I might be watching.

Quadrants with the same stuff are easy to do in Windows (with Win+arrows). The tricky part is in various autolayouts &c. But that is also where usefulness diminishes for non-terminal stuff. GUI apps usually expect stacking.

As soon as you are tiling mouse-driven GUIs your having to do more work to traverse your screen with the mouse vs a stacking wm where your stacked GUIs can be flipped through with keyboard shortcuts.

I guess it makes sense if you have a bunch of apps you're predominantly reading from instead of interacting with but in my experience those are predominantly terminal UIs anyways.

Why not? I use a tiling wm and I love it. I'm able to make my desktop act exactly the way I want it to act. I don't appreciate my windows being rambunctious.

If I'm on a machine without a tiling wm I generally using everything maximized and alt-tab like you say. But that's still usually an extra click after opening an application.

I also love tmux, but I have a coworker that doesn't see the point.

So, having options is nice. I want to be able to work the way I want. I also want you and my coworker to be able to work your way.

I do pretty much everything in tmux and Emacs and sometimes ask myself ‘why not a tiling WM instead of tmux’?

I've never really given it a fair shot.

I guess it depends on your setup but being able to attach to an existing tmux session from another machine is something a tiling wm won't be able to offer.

There are tiling window managers for macOS and Windows.

I tried several, dont remember the names. They were mostly closed source and pretty much sucked, compared to i3, xmonad or awesome.

> (& *BSDs)

You must be a C++ programmer [1].

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25224958/dereference-a-p...

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