Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

I tried using a custom "window manager" for Windows a while ago (back in the Vista days IIRC) and it didn't really work well.

The main problem was that, as far as I could tell, the window manager couldn't really preempt the windows and force them to show up in a certain way. Instead it basically asked them "pretty please, could you show up at this location with these dimensions?". As a result frozen apps (such as graphical apps that triggered a breakpoint in code or are simply misbehaving) or apps running as admin would refuse to obey and stay stuck. IIRC one workaround was to run the window manager with admin privilege but even that didn't help with frozen apps I think. Besides I wasn't really comfortable running such an application with administrator privileges.

Of course that was a long time ago and it was a non-MS project, hopefully this one works better. I really can't see myself working without a tiling WM anymore, "conventional" desktops feel terribly clunky and inefficient to me.

Windows doesn’t really have a window manager like the concept from X11. Basically the apps get messages and by using the standard libraries to handle a selection of messages, you get the behavior you’d expect of a Windows app, like the maximizing and minimizing, resizing and the Windows 10 specific zooming behavior. But there is little coordination and no separate process that draws window frames or something like that.

Also normal apps can’t send messages to elevated apps because there are ways to take over apps by sending the messages that you can’t really defend against.

Thank you for confirming my intuitions, I wasn't entirely sure if it was a hard limitation of the way Windows handled... windows or if it was just buggy software. So I guess this new WM suffers from the same limitations?

This experience actually made me wary of Wayland and other X11 replacements because, as far as I understand, they behave similarly. I could be completely wrong about that though because I still haven't completely figured out how Wayland actually works and every time I looked for infos on this particular topic I ended up more confused than when I started.

I can confirm PowerToys does need to run as admin for this functionality.

Sway is a Wayland only WM and doesn't suffer of any the shortcomings you describe.

Each wayland compositor is like a combination of X and a singular wm wherein the existing Wayland standard provides a framework for implementing rather than each person reinventing their own x alternative.

This is true for Win32 apps but window management of UWP apps is more coordinated, with a process that draws all the window frames.

I’ve encountered similar issues with macOS tiling window managers. At the end of the day, you’re bolting on behaviors that the original designers of the system didn’t intend you to, and there’s always going to be tension there.

When I’m on Linux I love using xmonad/i3, but on other platforms I’ve learned to accept the defaults; otherwise you just end up using things that work most of the time, but not really, and it’s really infuriating when you expect your workflows to be snappy and consistent.

Have you tried chunkwm[1] on Mac? It has it's issues but it has served me fine for the last few years.

[1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/chunkwm

There's also AppGrid[2] for Mac, which I've been using for years and still use to this day. It's simple but flexible.

[2] https://github.com/mjolnirapp/appgrid

I've had a lot of success with Amethyst, can't imagine using my Mac without it now.

i've been using spectacle for many years pretty happily. maybe too basic for some but works great for my needs

https://www.spectacleapp.com/

Yeah, even Windows 10 Tablet Mode is pretty poorly supported in windows apps, and that's just "fullscreen all the things" - it tends to fall over on dialog boxes and the like.

Not surprised that more sophisticated alternate window-layout systems would also fail badly.

This was a motivation for the design of UWP apps (which use a different approach to window management, involving a dedicated system process that is responsible for drawing and managing all the window frames), as well as how they were originally presented differently from Win32 apps in a separate "area" back in the Windows 8 days.

It's extremely difficult to make any significant change to the paradigm of how Win32 apps are managed and presented and have it work consistently for arbitrary apps - for example they recently tried to add a feature to Windows that allowed arbitrary native apps to be switched and managed via a tab strip like web apps. Worked fine for UWP apps, but when they tried to extend it to arbitrary Win32 they got mired in edge cases and eventually dropped the feature.

Yeah, but I also remember when it was the explorer itself that was bad. I don't know if they've fixed it, but Windows Explorer failing to show copy status and things like that was really disappointing - that's not 3rd party, that's not even outside of the OS team.

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