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It's clear that the floating windows paradigm is outdated and we need something better. But I'm not sure that floating WMs like you see on linux today are the answer (even ignoring their terrible usability for anyone but power users).

Personally, the situations where I actually want to have windows next to each other for any significant amount of time are basically a one in a million occurance. Usually I have multiple "complex" windows open that I switch between (browser, IDE and so on). It would be nice to have them visible next to each other all the time, but there is simply not enough screen space to do so, tiling or not. The other use case that happens very often is that I have a "complex" window open and need to quickly drag&drop a file from the file explorer into that window. Again, a tiling WM is not suitable for this because it would make both windows too small to use.

Many tiling WMs also lack the concept of minimizing. It's often the case that I have multiple windows (for example file explorers with different directories) where I only need one window at a time and the others are minimized for quite a while. But I do not want to close those windows because I will still need them later.




I actually decided to try tiling because using heavy applications like IDEs was annoying in floating WMs - it was a constant stream of interrupting work to go to the window list in the taskbar or alt-tabbing 'X' number of times to go back to that other window.

Virtual desktops solve these problems effectively if the shortcuts are set up properly (not ctrl-alt-1/2/3/4 and ctrl-alt-arrowkeys, which iirc has been the default for a while). When I am programming I have one workspace with just one terminal running vim split into a 3x3 grid of files. Next to it is a workspace with a terminal and Firefox running side-by-side - terminal to compile/run and FF for documentation. Below and diagonal to the the vim workspace accumulates whatever else I'm needing at the time - file explorers, terminals, browsers, GIMP, etc. Switching between these workspaces is easier than alt-tabbing (meta+WASD - only one finger needs to move, and also meta + the 4x4 grid on the keyboard mapped one key to each workspace for long-distance moves).

Minimizing is accomplished by moving it to another workspace: meta+alt+WASD.

The only real issue is drag-n-drop, which requires the sequence of: float the window => move it to the other workspace => drag-n-drop => move it back to the initial workspace => unfloat.




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