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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

The very essential things a window manager should let me do are:

Launch applications (which might create new windows). Switch between windows. Close windows.

That sounds like the people who grew up using nothing but a smartphone all their lives. I find that there's an entire new generation of developers (and likely users) who don't understand basic window management at all --- all they have on their huge monitors all the time is one maximised application. Meanwhile I have several dozen windows open, all of various sizes, and when they see it, they are surprised at how I can work in such an environment.

No, I would not consider something that can't do what even Windows 1.0 could (tiled, nonoverlapping windows) a "window manager".

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My cwm setup with a keyboard it's like that, but with a far better approach.

~/.cwmrc:

https://termbin.com/3jrl

It has a border (2px/4px dep. on the mood), you can execute programs with autocomplete (win+a), search between open windows (win+s), resize/move them, close (win+q), move them to virtual tags (desktops) shift+win+1-4, and go to each of these tags (win+1-4).

Minimal but actually usable. And fast as hell. I don't even need a mouse, and my RSI plumetted once I came from Emacs for a experiment (yes, I always had Ctrl and CapsLock switched over), even with CWM.

I find your stance uneducated.

I use tiling vm fully (sway) and mostly work in single app full screen, one desktop per app, which is the least disruptive way possible to use a PC for work. You should try it.

It's stupid to have a huge monitor (or monitors) and then use only a tiny fraction of it. I don't need a little window showing a few lines of text to be any bigger than it needs to be.

You should try it.

I've used an Android phone plugged into a monitor before when I had nothing else. Doesn't work for anything but the most trivial of situations, which IMHO says just how much work you actually do and how much information you actually use in your work. I need to look at multiple documents simultaneously to compare and refer to them. Switching between windows all the time and trying to memorise what they showed for a second or two is a stupid inefficiency.

When you have scanning eyes, any window on-screen that you are currently not scanning is a waste of pixels. These pixels could display data from your focused window instead.

Agreed, but I'll often be looking at one window while typing into another.

I don't need the "focused" window to be 32" big.

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