I turned gnome-shell into a tiling window manager | Hacker News Reader

I turned gnome-shell into a tiling window manager

gfxmonk.net

45 pointsgfxmonk21 comments

I think more people should write similar extensions or even new window managers. In my opinion, “traditional” window management is quirky, even if we've all grown used to it. Resizing and moving windows, for example, are painful given how you need to click on small specific areas to carry them out. Most window managers on Linux have overcome with a combination of a key press and mouse click allowing you to move/resize by clicking anywhere in the window. With a tiling window manager you usually have some keyboard shortcut to do it.

Still, none of those approaches solve the problem in all situations. Managing windows can be “uncomfortable”. Sure you can make use of workspaces, or tags (à la dwm, I think the tag paradigm is beautiful) or whatnot, but you don't want to think about the act of switching windows. Have you ever found yourself alt-tabbing through a pile of windows and be annoyed by not getting to the right window easily enough (“Oh, drat, I pressed Tab one too many times”). Whenever I have to use OS X, I press the Exposé shortcut for almost every context switch.

So yeah, this is kind of extension is more than welcome and others should continue to innovate. If nothing else good comes out of Gnome 3, at least it would have pushed people to think about their interaction with the interface.

What tool was used to make that screencast? I'd love to know about a tool for Linux that overlays keypresses on the video like that.

https://launchpad.net/screenkey/

Had to hack it up a bit to show the shift key, and only the most recent keypress.

And gnome-shell-list has built in screen recording.

Looks good. There seems to be a lot of experimentation with tiling wm-s, even win8 seems to be going in that direction if I saw those videos right. Change is good.

I think what we need is a window manager (or a window layout behaviour) per workspace or screen rather than a single window manager to rule them all.

I tried to use the tiling window manager xmonad and found it excellent for terminal stuff. The problem was everything else.

Firefox/thunderbird/etc. don't work in a tiling window manager, particularly Firefox and particularly popups.

A sensible tiling window manager doesn't tile popup windows (and I believe xmonad is sensible). If it doesn't float popups, then you just haven't configured it to do so. Can't blame you, though. Writing Haskell to configure a window manager isn't exactly a one-step process. I think parts of the following resource will prove useful if you ever decide to give xmonad another try: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/General_xmonad.hs_...

The layout behaviour in both shellahape and bluetile is per-workspace.

Is this any different from xmonad? That's what I'm currently using with Gnome. Way better than this Gnome 3 rubbish.

Sometimes i wish xmonad had 3d transitions between layouts. That's probably the only appeal of a gnome shell extension

Why is that, by the way? I've tried various transitions over the years and for any serious work I've soon settled for the plain old immediate "transition", i.e. nothing at all. Anything else has turned out just annoying, for me.

At a largely Windows-based shop I installed Linux on my system and had Gnome set up with some fancy 3d-box transitions. I got some startled wows from my coworkers when they were helping me with something over my shoulder and I switched desktops.

However, I always found myself reducing the transition time bit by bit, until I eventually got rid of the transition. When I'm in the zone and coding I might be checking docs or some output on one workspace, and I want to switch workspaces and begin typing without the feedback delay. I already have the next 20 keystrokes planned out, and I'd rather be rate limited by my fingers than my WM.

You certainly want to eventually get rid of all the transitions when you've learned to use a WM instinctively, but for newbies they can provide valuable feedback.

Or you could show a single window on both monitors (if you have two), for example, xmobar. Or you could resize the windows as bitmaps instead of resizing app size into grotesque values (150x150 pixel browser?) in various tiling layouts. Not that this allows it right now, but working composite manager (and the compositing manager in gnome3 is good, compared to its alternatives) is required for that.

A few differences, yeah. You get to keep the gnome bling (eg the overlay window). It also supports direct manipulation (mouse moving / resizing) and overlapping windows. Oh, and compositing works.

Plus, the floating mode isn't bad ;)

hm, I already have the gnome toolbar with xmonad. Mouse moving and resizing also works, for overlapping windows just float them.

Well done, looks really nice. Tiling wm is very useful.

It's still a piece of crap, though.

You might want to add a little more information on your page explaining what it is. I.e. What is the difference with Bluetile? With tmux?

Also, if I start gnome-terminal, run tmux, and put it full-screen.. isn't it a "gnome tiling manager" ?

It tiles windows, not terminal sessions.

I was a bit confused at first. When he said tiling windows with the gnome terminal I thought, "is this just a GNU screen tutorial with a buzz-words title?" When I saw the browser windows in there I started to wonder how you embedded a browser into a gnome-terminal tab.

It took watching the video to see that it was more integrated than I first expected.

He's talking about gnome-shell, not a gnome terminal.

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