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Comment by smallerfish | Hacker News Reader

I think he's bang on with his observation that overlapping windows are a relic.

My wife, whose technical level leans her towards wanting to replace her mac mini when a VPN that she'd installed and then disabled left hostile firewall rules in place ("the internet is flaky on this computer"), is jealous of the tiling setup on my desktop (was hyprland; now sway with a custom dwindle layout). I think tiling has an audience beyond nerds, but I think nobody (perhaps with the exception of omarchy) has made a serious attempt at packaging it in a way that's accessible to business/productivity users. KDE's tiling attempts were, at least last time that I checked, somewhat bolted on and half-assed. I wish omarchy success in de-vibing their codebase, but it would be great to have some serious competition in the space.

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> overlapping windows are a relic.

I hope not. I've tried tiling and I just don't like it. I may be in the minority these days, and it may simply be my forty years of use patterns, but you'll have to take my overlapping windows from my cold, dead hands.

Fair, but is it possible you've tried it on a setup that wasn't done particularly well?

> overlapping windows are a relic.

> it may simply be my forty years of use patterns

Those two statements are perfectly consistent with each other.

Eh… as someone who agrees, I think overlapping windows are a feature, not a bug. Very often a window is transient, in that it’s something I need to give my attention to and once it’s done, it’s gone. In a naive tiling window manager, all windows have to re-tile themselves while the transient window is open, just to then return to their previous layout once it’s done anyway. The ideal interaction in my opinion is for the transient window to simply be “on top really quick” and I can just alt+tab if I need to see what’s underneath it. The degenerate case tiling proponents always point out is that “what if the window you need is obscured” and tbh I just never have that problem? Between a quick alt+tab, or the win+arrow shortcuts doing “tiling-lite” when I need it, I’ve never thought “gee I wish something would figure out a tile layout for all these windows”.

More generally, tiling is what you want when you have a particular layout you like, each window has a reason for existence, and you want them all open and visible at the same time. That constitutes like, 10% of my time using a computer. Mostly I just want “give me a new window, let me do a thing, then it’s gone”, with said new window occupying 100% of my attention while it’s there. Having to carve out space for it in a tile layout (even if the tiling is automatic) just doesn’t make sense with the way I use my machine.

You seem to be framing it as an either-or decision.

> In a naive tiling window manager

Ok, so you're arguing with a straw man. Do you have a point worth trying to understand?

Yikes, that’s a little strong.

A tiling window manager is a lot more useful if it doesn’t always tile, yes. The ones I’ve tried don’t seem to have a graceful way of saying “allow overlapping just this once”, but I’ve only tried a few of them (i3 is the one I remember most. I honestly can’t remember if I tried hyprland. If I did it was probably only for a few minutes.)

Now, you seem to be upset that I don’t “have a point worth trying to understand”, perhaps you can enlighten the class and explain why your tiling window manager of choice does this better? I’ve already described my ideal interaction, so if your WM does this well I’d love to hear about it. As it is right now, you seem to be the one who’s withholding details.

> I think he's bang on with his observation that overlapping windows are a relic.

The paradigm of setting windows on the desktop strategically placed so parts of the title bars or portions of windows that can be clicked without issue are visible can be a really useful one. Combine this with virtual desktops and it works nicely so you don't have one humongous blob of everything but a few strategically placed windows dedicated to one task in each virtual desktop, overlapping so that each window is large enough to use.

I'm not a big fan of tiled windows. I tend to focus on one window at a time and if I am focusing on just one, then a large amount of screen space is wasted.

So please don't just take that away because some dev somewhere is a fan of tiling windows.

You're describing the taskbar

Based on his demos I don't think his statement is that overlapping windows are a relic, more that overlapping windows are a thing people deal with and we need something in between overlapping windows and Expose-style fanouts.

The iPad offered only tiling till about 3.5 years ago, and tiling is still available as an option in Settings.

And some people connect their iPad to a full-size monitor, keyboard and mouse and use it as their main desktop machine.

Fair - I used one only briefly when they first came out. Are there any serious attempts on desktop that I'm overlooking?

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