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Comment by metalliqaz | Hacker News Reader

Every time I see these screenshots of tiling window managers like dwm, there is always a browser window smooshed into a block that is barely big enough for a term.

I really don't get it. Who uses a web browser like that? I almost always maximize my browser on my desktop, and when i want to share the space with something I'm working on, I maybe will split the screen in half, or just have floating windows on top of each other. Alt+tab works pretty well.

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I rarely use dwm's tiling: I almost always have most things maximized with perhaps one or two floating windows. I use workspaces/tags and alt-tab to switch between stuff.

I'm not sure how representative the screenshots are of actual usage.

>I'm not sure how representative the screenshots are of actual usage.

There's a subreddit for that r/UsabilityPorn

I've noticed myself doing this with Tmux. I'll occasionally have a terminal that is essentially a thumbnail that I swap into a bigger pane. I think people doing this are making up for a lack of having a visual pager since they went minimalistic.

The way dwm works, you have a main window and you have a stack. It is normal to have windows you are not using in the stack. The small window is indeed not very useful, but it is still more than the icon used in other places.

Windows has a stack too. Most recently used on top. Older windows are either partially or completely covered, but they always have an icon accessible. Would I dedicate a section of my screen to windows down the stack? No, I don't think I would. I guess I just don't get the zen of dwm.

I have tried both workflows. I used a (very) customized dwm for years, and use windows nowadays. Windows works, but dwm is really dynamic. Screenshots don't do it justice.

With windows, once I have a large number of windows, working in several things at the same time, I'm really afraid of losing that setup (for example, leaving my laptop unattended for a while and see that the system had the great idea of rebooting while I was gone). With dwm, I had the layout I wanted with much less effort. It adapts to what I'm doing. It's very fluid.

None is perfect, both have pros and cons. And I understand some people don't like some of the design decisions in dwm like editing source to configure and so on, but dynamic window management is a powerful concept.

ya know it's funny, in my current windows 10 system, I sometimes don't notice the auto reboots, because it reopens my windows, which are usually just browsers on a normal day.

For actual use, look at r/UsabilityPorn

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