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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

> Most likely it was a deliberate technical limitation

At the time I remember reading that was kind of the issue. I thought the article said something like "when Gates saw the Xerox machine, the display had no overlapping windows". So M/S cloned it as he saw it.

Once M/S W1.0 was developed he saw the demo again and was surprised the windows overlapped. So they rushed 2.0 to fix it.

But funny, with all people on Linux using tiling window managers these days, it seems Windows 1.0 was ahead of its time :)

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>"when Gates saw the Xerox machine, the display had no overlapping windows". So M/S cloned it as he saw it. Once M/S W1.0 was developed he saw the demo again and was surprised the windows overlapped.

Microsoft had Apple Lisa's in-house, and Charles Simonyi in person direct from Xerox PARC, and worked on pre-release Macintoshes in coordination with Apple to develop Microsoft Word for the Mac, all well in advance of any MSWindows development. There is no way the story is as simple as the above.

Yeah, it’s interesting how the desktop metaphor evolved over time but increasing display size and the ability to have multiple workspaces surely is a huge part of what makes tiling almost work.

And tiling still largely doesn't work with small windows.

You can tile windows in Windows as well with the windows key+ arrow buttons.

The default is just left, right, and top, bottom but if you install Power Toys and use Fancy Zones you can customize the zones https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon....

There’s also Crop and Lock which can help you cut out extraneous parts of certain windows

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/crop-and...

> You can tile windows in Windows as well with the windows key+ arrow buttons.

_only_ if you enable hard corners, or something like this, which makes moving windows between screens, difficult.

What makes it hard to move windows between screens? You can do it with the key command or by dragging with the mouse.

I have a three monitor setup and have no problem rearranging the windows as I please

They are a bit out of fashion these days.

The main use-case was multiplexing terminals and, after tmux provided a solution that was usable by normal users, it seduced people away.

Also, mouse-first tiling was introduced on Windows so nowadays it is almost universal to have a degree of tiling.

They are nice for terminals and browsing properly-written web pages but for anything with an aspect ratio or a fixed size they are clumsy.

Modern tiling-wms often have a floating mode so the distinction is more keyboard-wm vs mouse-wm.

> The main use-case was multiplexing terminals and, after tmux provided a solution that was usable by normal users, it seduced people away.

Are you sure about this history? I'd always heard that GNU Screen had been popular for a while before tmux, and from double checking, Screen dates back to 1987, the same year that Windows 2.0 came out. tmux didn't come for another two decades.

You are right.

Although I don't know about "popular".

To clarify, my impression was that many people started using tmux around the time when it was introduced including a few who had been using screen before.

Yes but screen didn't feature tiling when it first came out. That came much later.

It makes sense too because at that point most terminals were still physical with fixed dimensions. Most applications didn't handle terminal resizing yet. Especially on the fly.

> They are nice for terminals and browsing properly-written web pages but for anything with an aspect ratio or a fixed size they are clumsy.

True but that's also a factor of tiling being so niche. If it were more common the apps would take it into account and just not so fixed sizes as much.

There's only few uses that really require it like video.

We don't have to guess about what was going on at Microsoft in those days. From "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates":

The day the Mac shipped in January 1984, Gates told McGregor to run out and buy a Mac for the Windows developers.

"Reverse engineer it," Gates told him. "I have applications like BASIC and Multiplan that we've hacked out for the Mac, and we're working on other Mac applications like Word with a graphical user interface. I want to run all those Mac applications on Windows." Apparently, Gates didn't see a conflict of interest with this strategy.

...

"How are they different?" Gates snapped back. "They both draw fucking lines on the screen, right? They both put things in windows, right? Mac wrote a windows thing, you wrote a windows thing, they ought to be able to run the same stuff together."

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