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Comment by Zetaphor | Hacker News Reader

I've become a really big fan of this model of window management after using Karousel on KDE for the last 3 months. This is especially useful if you're using a widescreen monitor.

I never understood the appeal of tiling as 99% of the time I am focused on a single window at a time and I want it to take the full height of my display, so scrolling with the focused window centered is my ideal workflow.

I only wish I had the ability to quickly toggle the side-by-side mode that is default with these for the occasional time I need to have a code editor next to my browser.

If anyone knows if any of these supports that toggle, while also supporting the other key features I use in karousel (being able to shrink/expand the focused window with a hotkey), then I'd be willing to leave KDE to get that perfect workflow.

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Do you not often quickly look between files? If so, odds are you're using tiles within tmux, vim, emacs, vscode, or something.

I use kakoune, which has a client/server architecture. Each kak instance I open within a project connects to the same server, so it is natural for me to use my WM (niri) to tile my terminals, instead of having something like tmux or the editor do the tiling for me. I don't want to bother with more than one layer of WM, where separate layers don't mix.

>I never understood the appeal of tiling

I like physical positional cues, and being able to just flick my eyes over to other things to check status rather than having to scroll through hidden context. I have a terrible habit of losing my train of thought if I check on something that's hidden, and thereby hide my current work. So just being able to glance and then glance back is a huge plus.

I also have an insane amount of screen real estate on my work machine (2x 4K 30" displays, 1x 2K 15"), so I can have everything on screen at once. I mostly use terminals, a couple browsers, and slack, so YMMV if you are using a bunch of IDE-like windows or the like.

> I never understood the appeal of tiling as 99% of the time I am focused on a single window at a time and I want it to take the full height of my display

Even if everything is full screen, it enforces that I don't have something else hidden behind, gives me the ability to snap immediately between them (programs/workspaces) with a keyboard shortcut.

I mostly only have 1 full screen program per workspace (sway on Linux, yabai on macOS) but find that invaluable, really struggle to use say my wife's laptop with an overlapping mess of windows, where the best I can is tab between them. The main exception, where I do have them actually tile, is terminals - I don't need the full width anyway, so my workspace 1 is always 2-3 alacritty instances. Everything else that's always open is full screen in its own workspace.

It sounds like we might have similar goals.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41343002

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39803702

This got pretty close to perfect for me

papersway has a toggle like that :)

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