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Comment by karmakaze | Hacker News Reader

I never really understood the appeal of tiling window managers. I've gotten used to having overlapping windows with appropriate parts peek out out behind others. e.g. tail of a log behind an editor running a program, and I can bring it to the foreground to see older lines and/or scroll. To do the same with a tiling manager, I would zoom the logging pane. I suppose I just prefer less layout changes. Same for Slack, I have just enough peeping out to know there's some messages but I can't see the message text so I can ignore them until I'm ready.

Are there situations that make more sense to use a tiling manager like on larger (where all the tiles are usable) or smaller screens (where full expansion makes sense)?

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For me it was a couple of X11 features not often found on mac or windows that made me think about the desktop in a desktop environment and what I want out of my window manager. My timeline sort of goes as follows.

1. focus follows mouse, the window you are pointing at gets the focus. This feels very strange at first. but pulls a surprising amount of friction out of working with multiple apps. However you have to pair this with.

2. don't raise on focus. this let you work on a lower window. to raise you click on a specific part of the window, usually the title bar. if you don't have this focus follows mouse is terrible. this lets you have the main window(usually the documentation or reference) open on top while you type away on the lower window.

3. At this point I heard of i3 and it made perfect sense to me. I have never said "boy I sure am glad this window is half covered up" I ether want one app full screen, two apps side by side(reference and work) or many small apps(terminals). why not just have the window manager enforce this instead of me fiddling with windows. these days I use mainly use spectrwm because it fills that perfect middle ground between too sparse(dwm) and too featured(i3).

That said, for my day to day operations(I sys-admin, so lots of terminals) it works great. however there are many apps that do not play well. for example, I recently set up a linux box for steam games and steam was not happy with i3(all menus were separate windows) this is probably fixable but I just went with a normal wm. And when I do actual work on it I am reminded why I like tiling wm's as I find myself shuffling windows all the time.

Closing thoughts, an example of a tiling wm internal to an app is blender, even before I started using tiling wm's I thought blender had a very good ui for getting work done, much better than the mdi type apps that were common at the time. so just imagine your whole desktop working that way. And tabs, really tabbed interfaces should be a function of your window manager not the app, but that ship has sailed and I don't think there is any way to fix it now.

I generally agree with you. I use my Mac with most of the windows overlapped most of the time. But occasionally I need them side-by-side to do some work. Typically referencing documents or code. Fortunately the introduction of this looks to just be an optional feature rather than a dictated "way things are".

An overlapped/stacked interface is fine a lot of the time, but the flexibility is important.

What really drives me crazy is the 100% tiled-interface. I feel like something important is just below the tiles, but I can't see it.

You can solve that easily with the free rectangle app today.

I love the Rectangle app. The problem is that the average Mac user has no idea this exists at all.

So when Joe Windows considers switching over to Mac, they see that there's no equivalent to the Windows snapping feature that's been in their OS since Windows 7, and they might think macOS is inferior.

I personally don't need this feature from Apple but I think they needed to add it for their own business needs.

The last time I tried Rectangle it didn't have any customization, just those predefined areas and nothing else. I really like how window management is done in KDE Plasma.

If you get the paid version then customization is an option, just FYI. Not sure when this was introduced but it’s been working well for me.

BetterTouchTool is not free but has the customization you seek. I’ve used it for about a decade now

To add more clarity here in case it's helpful: If you open the Rectangle app's settings menu and open the last tab (looks like a gear), you can play around with the "Gaps between windows" setting.

I have this set to 15px, so when I drag my app windows around, they snap to a grid with 15px spaces between the windows. Dunno why I find it so satisfying, but it really scratches an itch in my brain.

I have Rectangle installed and the only feature I use is dragging a window to the left or right edge to use half the screen. I don't even know if that's from Rectangle or macOS. The other thing I do is double-click edges to expand to edge of screen, which I assume is macOS.

It had let unable shortcuts to snap windows into various tile layout type configurations

Yes, I actually use Rectangle on both my work and personal laptops.

You can always run apps full screen. Then it's possible to have them side by side.

I'm thoroughly confused. How can a full screen program allow for a side by side?

Full screen is a mode that takes away the ability to move windows, and removes their chrome. You can have two windows in this mode, and they will just take up the whole screen between them.

I get a bunch of ui issues doing full screen, and though I use Magnet for snapping, I want something that stays snapped. Looks like this will do it.

The maximize button has an option to go into a split screen mode where you get two "half full" screens (i.e. side by side but still hide the menu bar, window chrome).

I wish there was a keyboard shortcut to run apps full screen

I used to use Slate[0] to manage my windows but have since switched to Raycast since it was a more enjoyable experience.

I have a 49" ultrawide so it's super useful to have precise control over where a window goes. I also use 3 desktops (as Apple calls them) and have different windows sizes depending on what I'm doing. Having overlapping windows would just be super annoying now!

[0] https://github.com/jigish/slate

With tiling managers you can do all you just listed + quick snapping. Who would say no to that?

The WM being tiling-dominant doesn’t really make sense if one only ever tiles the odd window every now and then. In that situation it makes more sense to use a floating-dominant WM with light tiling features (like that of Windows, most major Linux DEs, and now macOS).

I don't know how one can't see the appeal. Once I installed Rectangle on macOS I can quickly put windows side-by-side with a couple of keystrokes, and change which windows I want side-by-side extremely quickly

Fiddling with the mouse to resize windows manually or having windows overlapping and covering up information on each other is not really a great way to interface with them. Maybe it's helpful to locate the windows and bring them into focus, but once they're in focus and in use, I want to be maximizing their screen real estate and making sure they're 100% readable.

And, really, it's something the OS should have had at the very least as an optional feature for over a decade now. Windows introduced this feature in Windows 7. It's been a sore spot of a missing feature and it's especially detracting for the Windows users that Apple wants to have switch over to the Mac platform.

3x 27" monitors provides lots of space for multiple usable windows it helps to also be able to switch workspaces per monitor so you switch monitors with a hotkey rather than switching windows.

Compared to peek and switch it provides more usable space since windows can be maximized without leaving space for another window to peek out, less manual arrangement since Windows need not be carefully arranged. Also I normally switch because I want to do another task or in resource to a notification.

That said however we choose to analyze it it's in part subjective matter of taste. There is no singular correct answer.

I have a 55” 4k television that wasn’t being used, and as a joke plugged it into my Mac Mini, and with a tiling window manager it’s functionally 4 decent sized FHD monitors at once. I have left it plugged in much longer than I thought I would, it’s really much more functional than I’d imagined. I still probably prefer a regular 1440p display, for most tasks.

Same, except on purpose and it’s still plugged in.

I used 40 inch screens for many years. Tiling is must have for big screens and it works better than multiple screens combined togather

I have a 43" monitor and I don't tile my windows because the corners are so far away. I tend to make a 'fat cross' of overlapped windows that don't really use the corner areas.

43 inch is just 4 21.5inch monitors put together, you can look 1 tile at a time and ignore the rest. Literally just treat it as 4 screens and don't forget to move your head.

I do the same. It’s a hierarchical steppe like system. Maybe if we gave it a name, people would develop to this target.

Agreed. Messy overlap + an app called HazeOver where you can dim apps out of focus is the best approach to this.

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