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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

I've always thought tiling window managers were the future (as they're just flat out superior to windowing systems for many, many workflows). I just didn't know it would be Apple that would make it popular. But, maybe tiling will become the de facto UI for everything in the next few years. I'd like that.

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A vague tiling like functionality has been available in Windows since 7. In 10 it looks they're finally expanding this to have more options then just halves, something I've been doing with a third party program for awhile now (it has halves, thirds, and quarters).

This is not a true tiling WM but I've personally found their use a bit limited as there are times when it makes sense to have multiple windows overlapping, at least in my own work.

A tiling WM still likely uses a "windowing system" (a display server like Quartz in this case, I think?) underneath, though some like rio do overlap.

It's also funny to note how tiling is the future, given that it was already the past. Tiling was how some of the earliest GUIs were done because it's the simplest compared to stacking and particularly compositing. Windows 1.0 was tiling, IIRC.

It is funny then that the original Xerox GUI would default to tiling, but allow the user to move the windows around as floating ones afterwards. Even Windows 1.0 was tiling. Floating only came with 2.0.

It makes sense especially in light of widescreen displays. We have much more horizontal space today than we did when modern windowing systems were innovated.

I've been wanting an excuse to learn Haskell, XMonad could be the reason. :)

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