In the sections below, we’re going to discuss the main benefits of tiling, taking a look at the approach of different tiling window managers to each of them. In the same way that a Vim user will miss vi-keybindings in any other text editor, someone who uses a tiling window manager long enough will come to miss its particular workflow if they go back to a more mainstream floating/compositing window manager. Tiling window managers are a lot like old text editors: weird and off-putting at first, but extremely powerful and comfortable if you can get used to them. Unlike *nix software, Windows internals aren’t made to be mixed-and-matched. While tiling window managers do exist for Windows, they tend to feel about as kludgey and fragile as most other third-party replacements for internal Windows components. But we’ll need to journey to *nix land to discover it. 1 If only there was a better, more efficient way… But you had to manually drag a bunch of floating windows around to do so. The photos of my screen weren’t coming out nicely.Īnd now that you’re using Windows 10, corner snapping is a possibility, so you can work in four different applications at once, should you feel like it.Ĭongratulations! You’ve turned your back on traditional floating window management and are now using a tiling window manager. Or, if you need to take notes while you browse the web, maybe you’ll snap notepad to one side of the screen. It took a little longer than Andreessen predicted, but Windows is finally just a poorly debugged set of device drivers for running a web browser. You can move these windows around, hide them, and expand them to the full size of the desktop.Īt first, the whole point of windows appears to be having a lot of stuff open at the same time, all scattered about and overlaying each other.īut as soon as you really want to get anything done, you end up fullscreening one of those windows and just working with that. When your computer starts up, you’re greeted with a blank desktop, and in order to do something with it, you open up one or more applications, which, in a bit of a mixed metaphor, appear as “windows” on top of your desktop. Everyone who’s used a computer operating system (whether Windows, Mac or the more popular desktop Linux distributions) knows what windows are.

Windows tiling window manager