Comment by arghwhat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arghwhat | Hacker News Reader

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I either need a window positioned for active usage, or don't need the window visible at all.

A tiling WM not only enforces this (although it can switch to floating if needed), it handles positioning automatically so I don't need to fidget with positioning and sizing of multiple windows. It also minimizes useless fluff to make it easy to have even more windows operated in parallel.

Windows, macOS, GNOME and others do various degrees of tiling as a sign of the usefulness. Even fullscreen is just a special case of tiling with 1 window.

If you're a kind of person that always fullscreen things, you'll enjoy a tiling WM.

(I don't understand people that work with small floating windows. It's a waste of limited screen real estate, and means you don't get to see as much of what you're working on as you could. Suboptimal.)

> I don't understand people that work with small floating windows. It's a waste of limited screen real estate, and means you don't get to see as much of what you're working on as you could. Suboptimal.

I use a tiling window manager at home, but when I'm at work I have to use a windows machine. I often use vim to do stuff and when I do I usually keep it to 80x24 or 80x48 (my preference is 80x24 unless what I'm working on has a lot of long function definitions). If I'm working out of a single vim window (which I've built my vimrc around to some extent), I don't need to see a lot of info at the same time, so I can put that window at exactly the part of the (enormous these days) screen which is most amenable to my neck angle, and don't have to jump around the screen much with my eyes, which helps me zone in. I'll only go full screen if I have to analyze a huge CSV dump or something, where the lines are not kept to a sensible length, or occasionally when I use vimdiff (but even then I have my defaults set so that I don't need more than 120 width to use a 2 way diff effectively). Spreading my info needlessly across the real estate feels less optimal to me I guess

> I don't understand people that work with small floating windows.

I don’t know for the floating part, I guess it is a personal thing.

But for the many small windows shown at the same time, it’s pretty useful when exploring and comparing texts, data, code, logs...

The floating part was critical, as it was about having unused screen space.

Tiling many windows (some being small) is what tiling is about.

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