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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

Reasons why you shouldn't try a tiling window manager:

Well, mostly if you use tools that have a "view portal" or depend heavily on pop-out style toolboxes. The WM is constantly resizing your windows, which makes it a chore to keep everything adjusted, and pop-out style toolboxes are pretty much best at on-top usage by nature, rather than tiled.

I use CAD software on a regular basis, and while I managed to make a tiling WM work for me for maybe 6 months, returning to a floating WM was a relief. If you work directly with text all day, I bet they are great, but for me...

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Have you considered i3? It supports fully floating windows separate from the tiling, and normal pop-up windows go straight to the floating layer. It's extremely handy (As what you noted annoys me a ton with WM's like XMonad). i3 can act just like a normal floating WM if needed.

i3wm was the only one I could even tolerate, and the one I used the longest. I had enough control to make toolboxes floating, and to size important windows correctly.

But at the end of the day it was a chore to use and just didn't add much value. I guess what you could take away is I want/need my windows to be sized & placed specifically the way I direct, and a tiling WM is the opposite of this.

Notion does a pretty good job of letting you mix floating and tiled windows. I do it manually by pressing Win+D, which I have bound to ioncore.detach. It's nice because all child windows that spawn from that program are floaters by default. It also lets you specify that new windows of particular programs should float by default or open in specifically named frames.

I wouldn't be able to GIMP without this...

I have been using Awesome for a couple years now, and it has a great solution to this problem. You can add a rule to a window class (MPlayer creates a window with the class "MPlayer" for example) and set the "floating" property to true. The property can of course be toggled with a keyboard shortcut which is very handy with lots of terminals.

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