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Comment by dugmartin | Hacker News Reader

I've been using i3 (within the larger Regolith package) for a few years now and its hard for me to non-tiling WMs now. However I do think there would be a lot of improvements, especially with large desktop monitors.

One idea I had would be to have a window manager only have a single main window in each desktop and then scaled down windows around the border on the desktop, like the TV in Idiocracy (https://www.soundandvision.com/files/_images/200902/21720091...). Selecting windows would swap out the main window with the scaled version on the border. This would give you the ability to focus on one window that is always centered while seeing scaled versions of all the other window's output.

Maybe this has already been done?

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Dynamic tiling window managers like dwm and xmonad can do this. They default to a 'master/stack' layout but you can change the layout algorithm. You esentially have a 'master' window and a stack of secondary windows. You can promote a window with super+enter and it gets swapped into the master area.

There are some autotiling scripts for i3 that can emulate this behavior as well.

AwesomeWM as well. It allows you to write your own tiling algorithms in Lua.

I thought that xmonad just changed the windows dimensions and location for most of the layout configurations, can it change scale of the windows as well?

Many years ago, 1982, there was an applie ii video game named Dung Beetles. It was a pac man style dot chomper in a maze. Except the maze was quite large and the area around the player was viewed as if through a magnifying glass. I would find it interesting -- but probably unworkable -- if my virtual desktop were 5x and any window not focused were small and when focused it blows up to normal size. With some options of being able to make windows stay large when not focused and etc.

This sounds a bit like the Stage Manager thing in newer macOS versions. Except that they do this with groups which can have more than one window.

The centeredmaster patch for dwm works roughly like that - the master window(s) is in the center of the screen and the rest is stacked on the left and right.

That sounds like how dwm tiles windows

Pretty sure it's doable with i3 although needs some tinkering.

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