Re: [tlug] A good old fashioned topic

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2017-10-30 15:21 +0900 (Mon), Andreas Kieckens wrote:

> I moved to i3 from Cinnamon when I got a 4k monitor at work. When you've 
> got that much screen real estate, maximizing windows just leads to a 
> huge white border left and right.

But you end up with the same problem, wasted screen real-estate, with
any tiling window manager (albeit often in less severe form).

Perhaps the problem is more severe for me because I'm a coder and so
most of my windows are 80 columns wide. In a code editing window
anything wider than 80 columns (or whatever your wrapping standard is)
is a waste becuase it won't be showing code but simply blank space;
anything less will cause lines to wrap annoyingly. Tiling window
managers don't generally give you a way to tell them "these windows
should never change width."

So what do you do with the small blank spaces exposed by your
non-tiling window manager? As it turns out, partially covered windows
(that do not pop up to cover other things--no raise on focus kinda
goes along with using a stacking WM effectively) are still surpisingly
useful. 

In windows tailing logs it's often very convenient to have them wide
and tall and view just some part of the lower-left corner most of the
time so you can see when new messages arrive and a bit about what
they're about. (If you try this in a tiling window manager, you'll
find you can't look at the left 20-30 columns of a much wider window;
instead it narrows the window width to 20-30 columns and now you see a
heavily-wrapped single message rather than the start of each of the
last half dozen messages.) If you need to see more you can pop that
window to the top with a keystroke or two, scan it in all its huge
glory, and then shove it back below again to keep the partial view
while going back to what you were doing before.

In command line windows, again, it's often nice to have a wide, large
window where you see the lower-, left- or lower-left- part of it much
of the time, only bringing it up to the top when you need to see more
of it.

In short, forcing you to change the size of a window, and thus usually
the contents displayed in it, just because you want to see only part
of the window, is a great failing of tiling window managers. That's
not to say that they couldn't work this way, but I've never seen one
that does.

I've never seen something using a tiling window manager and get as
much useful stuff on to the screen as I would get on the same screen
with my stacking window manager. Ironically enough, most people are
also much slower at basic operations (such as maximize vertically for
a moment, then go back) in tiling managers than I am in fvwm2.

cjs
-- 
Curt J. Sampson      <cjs@example.com>      +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L Peter Deutsch