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Zv/9Problems: A Tiling Window Manager for Plan9

github.com

47 pointsrcarmo18 comments

Windows and tiles mostly make sense for giant screens. As a laptop user, I notice that most of the time I want fullscreen windows. And sometimes it would be nice to split screen vertically into two parts. But being able to move and resize windows seems like an unnecessary complication. Benefits are not worth the time spent arranging windows.

It seems like developers do not want to make window sizes reasonable out of the box and instead want user to do it manually. For example, Gnome terminal opens in a tiny windows by default and you need to change settings to make its size adequate. Even worse, Gnome terminal doesn't remember the size when closed and started again.

A good windowing system is a system where you don't need to move or resize windows. It is an unpleasant chore.

Also, moving/resizing windows requires dragging across a large distance which is inconvenient on a touchpad because you need to keep our finger touching the surface and there is no key you could use to keep virtual mouse button pressed.

So it surprises me, why Apple's OS didn't have a maximize button before and had a large dock that overlaps with windows. Was Apple OS intended to be used only with large monitors?

> A good windowing system is a system where you don't need to move or resize windows.

That isn't necessarily true for everyone; the Lisa and Mac designers definitely did not feel that way.

> why Apple's OS didn't have a maximize button

Why would it? Early multitasking required being able to interact with multiple windows. It was always weird to me that Windows would have these giant windows preventing you from interacting with stuff in other windows. You bought an OS capable of running more than one app at once and you don't want to take advantage of it?

> Early multitasking required being able to interact with multiple windows.

If you have a laptop screen (especially low resolution screen from 2000s) you cannot have multiple windows visible at the same time and be useful. Imagine if you have a browser, a graphic editor, an IDE and spreadsheet. You simply cannot fit them onto 15" screen.

> the Lisa and Mac designers definitely did not feel that way.

This is weird, because at that time the screen resolution was something like 600x400 and you could not fit lot of information (like a text document or a folder with icons) even in fullscreen mode, let alone windowed mode. The smaller the window, the more you will have to scroll and scrolling then was slow and blocky.

I actually love this approach: floating by default, tiling when you say so.

I'm yet to see a tiling WM that handles very large (>27") screens sensibly, without wasting screen real estate. Having two terminals, each 200+ columns wide, side by side, is about as useful as having a 10m long mouse cable. Hybrid floating/tiling should get more love.

I used Wingo (https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo) for a while and it did the floating/tiling mix pretty well.

I also used StumpWM (https://stumpwm.github.io/) for years, primarily in purely-tiling mode. The killer feature for me was that you (the user) define frames on the desktop, and then windows are placed into frames rather than resizing and re-jiggering everything whenever a new window opens.

Wingo is great, and I even used BurntSushi's XGB to build my own WM a long while ago... but I'm hesitant to switch back to X11. Unfortunately writing a Wayland compositor is much less of a simple task.

You're allowed more than two columns! How about three terminals, each 133+ columns wide, side by side?

That's still not a great use of a 43" screen ;) When windows are automatically forced into a grid, they usually end up not the "right" size. A calendar or a chat app is usually fine taking a third of the screen (both vertically and horizontally), but a browser window is usually better taking roughly half of it. And just because from now on I have one less window on my screen, doesn't mean I want all its neighbors to suddenly get larger.

I have a bunch of hacked-together scripts that do this sort of "manual tiling" for me: I can tell a window to grow or shrink to take 1/3rd, half, or 2/3rds of the screen, and to push it around (center, edge, etc). It has some bugs and edge cases but works ok in practice.

https://github.com/rollcat/dotfiles/blob/master/.hammerspoon...

For very large screens I'd imagine ZUIs (like Pipeworld*) would work really well.

* <https://arcan-fe.com/2021/04/12/introducing-pipeworld/>

As others have pointed out this is entirely obsolete for modern 9front and people should instead use sigrids riow(1) http://man.9front.org/1/riow

sigrid has a more modern take on this as well, its on the fragrant git host, shithub.us

I wish I had this when I was still using OpenWindows on x86 Solaris 10... all the way up to 2012/2013. I would fake a tiled UI by setting up xterm to load four instances at specific pixel positions.

Didn't Solaris 10 ship with GNOME that supported snapping windows to the sides of the screen?

Yep, it actually wasn’t so bad too. However the environment I was supporting had a bunch of proprietary applications that were intended for OpenWindows and I was better off eating the dog food.

I so wish this were a modern/mass adopted paradigm with all these IoT and mobile devices.

What's wrong with riow(1)?

Easier to search for if not anything else. http://man.9front.org/1/riow does not say much apart from that it has tiling window manager keybindings, and not whether it has tiling. Does it tile?

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