(25-09-2020, 04:38 AM)venam Wrote: I keep thinking about this thread and I feel like the division between tiling and stacking is very limited.

Quote:Generically, window managers have two parts, the presentation, which displays windows and lay them around the screen, and the operations which is how the user enters commands to manipulate those windows. This is a vague overview of the basic and that gives rise to many possibilities and implementations.

Layout strategies, being part of the operation, is a much wider subject than tiling or stacking.
I'm not sure I'm expressing myself clearly, I've writting about WM & DE before but didn't go in depth into that particular aspect.

Have you ever thought about that?

Well, I remember windows 3.1 and 9x had a floating WM, that was able to automatically tile the windows. It was also possible to stick various windows to screen's borders. Those features were progressively removed AFAIK, but imo despite those "tiling" features I would still say they were stacking WMs, because they are intended to be used with floating windows: that was the normal way to deal with those.

Some tiling WMs (many? most? rare?) also provides floating mode, yet their normal mode is to have windows not stacking, thus they are tiling. For example, I would consider windows 8 WM a tiling one.

The layout question, imo, is mostly about tiling WMs, since stacking WMs hardly allows one to have such thing. There are tiling WM that put everything in a layout (I don't remember the names), others that are layout-free (i3).

(25-09-2020, 06:14 PM)ckester Wrote: [quote="acg" pid="18554" dateline="1499179253"]
Why not do this with a terminal multiplexer?

Well, quick answer: if your single terminal crash, you loose all the shells. Same for the multiplexer. Same for the WM.
A tiling window manager allows one to remove 2 of the list. It will also allows mixing those "terms" with other windows, moving them on different screens, etc. And, of course, allows one to only have 1 configuration to move windows, instead of 1 per application, since you can with a WM use single-tab browsers (file/web/whatever).

(25-09-2020, 06:54 PM)ckester Wrote: Can you clarify what you mean by "layout strategies"?

My understanding of it is that some tiling WMs'users can/must choose between a set of predefined layouts, instead of having to build those on the fly (which is i3 and many other's way), like having a main window on left side of the screen, and then a stack of windows on right side, maybe reducing those depending on their importance.
To help understanding, something like this:


This could make the WM easier to learn and use, but be less flexible. I think when I was investigating the topic years ago, xmonad for example was like that.