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Comment by antonvs | Hacker News Reader

> Managing windows with OS idiosyncrasies becomes a task in itself.

Tiling window managers are a good solution.

Tiling merely changes the idiosyncrasies, and I say this as someone who primarily uses them. (hyprland in my case)

If you created a window right now, where will it go? Which window will it take its space from? Does it use your focused window? Your mouse position? If your WM supports mixed floating & tiling, how does it go when you flip a window between them? etc. That's all cognitive load when you aren't familiar and still requires some hand control when you are.

This is why I use no window management. Windows are arbitrary sizes of what I happened to drag out last time. Windows piled on top of eachother. Some stuff in the back of the pile dates back weeks. A couple other piles of various windows in other desktop spaces. I like to think it is like a messy desk. Maybe closer to how we think in real life. Like you the tiling was a lot of faff. What goes where, how big shoudl they be? How can I fit xyz on both these windows but they can only be 5 inches wide to fit it all on the screen? All that friction and mental load fades away with the pile of junk method of window management. You'd be surprised how easily you find things in that pile too.

After having tried many tiling window managers over the years, I have also come to the conclusion that the ‘pile of windows’ model (sometimes spread across desktops) works best for me.

The most important thing is to have a way to search through the pile. (Raycast window search is pretty good.)

The word you're looking for is "spatial interface".

http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/spatial-nautilus.html

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/

I haven't used hyprland. I can answer your questions for XMonad, assuming you're using a typical standard layout.

> If you created a window right now, where will it go?

The new window becomes the focused window. It's inserted into the master position. Existing windows shift down the (conceptual) stack.

> Does it use your focused window?

It uses the same screen space, yes.

> Which window will it take its space from?

All of the other visible windows. It recomputes the tiles so that all tiles except the master become smaller, to make room for the new one.

> Your mouse position?

By default, mouse position is ignored. XMonad is keyboard-centric by design. You can set a mouse-follow configuration variable if you want. I've never tried it.

> If your WM supports mixed floating & tiling, how does it go when you flip a window between them?

It recomputes the tiles in much the same way as above. It's as though you deleted the window from the tiling and it becomes floating. And vice versa. It's a very consistent model.

I find it very natural and predictable. As far as "cognitive load" goes, that seems like an exaggeration, but again I haven't used hyprland.

If by "hand control" you mean using the mouse, that's definitely not needed for window management. In fact by default, XMonad doesn't even support resizing tiles using the mouse, and I've never tried to enable that. I do commonly use the mouse for switching focus, usually because I'm navigating to some location in another window anyway, in which case focus moves automatically.

I'm using Hyprland right now for its wayland support, but IMO so far the best mental model for window management I've seen is that of herbstluftwm with static layouts (you can still use dynamic tiling and tabs with it of course)

Yes, I tried a tiling window manager for about an hour and then stopped. It was absolute madness as the window size and positioning was seemingly random. I can't comprehend how anyone can use them

Used to use AwesomeWM for almost a decade before I forced myself to simplify to Gnome for other reasons, but I never felt like window sizing and positioning was random, it always opened in the logical place, which I kind of feel like is the whole value proposition of a window manager in the first place.

For curiosities sake, what window manager did you try?

Tiling window manager means relying heavily on workspaces. You distribute the windows over workspaces.

And most algorithms for management are deterministic. The position and the size of the new windows is always known.

I prefer desk based management. Windows like papers on my desk, piled on top of eachother peaking out from the sides. Seems chaotic but it is more aligned with how your brain works in the meatspace than looking at a bunch of things at once.

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