Comment by davidhollander | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidhollander | Hacker News Reader

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To me the most important factor for developing on a laptop mentioned in the article is the use of a tiling window manager.

For me an incredibly common task in web development is to have a web browser and 1 or more terminal windows tiled horizontally, side by side, in an [ A | B ] or [ A | [ B | C ]] configuration, where A is a web browser, and B and C are terminals.

In order for this to work for me on a screen resolution <= 1920x1080, the ratio ( width of A ) / ( width of screen ) should be dynamically adjustable using a single key combo, without causing window overlapping. If this ratio is fixed, and cannot be dynamically adjusted by the window manager, I experience one or more of the following problems at any given moment:

1. the web browser window is too narrow, causing wide documents to be clipped and a horizontal scroll bar to appear.

2. A terminal window is wider than 80 characters, causing unnecessary screen area to be consumed which could be better allocated toward the web browser.

3. A terminal window is less than 80 characters in width, preventing the entire line of code from being displayed.

To me Linux is the ideal laptop OS because it's the easiest OS to install a tiling window manager on, and a tiling window manager is what maximizes the platform's primary constraint: small screen area.

Tiling window managers don't maximize the use of small screen area; they ensure you'll almost always be using a fraction of the screen instead of the full screen.

Overlapping windows are the thing that maximized the use of a small screen, because they let you dedicate as much or as little of the screen to any given application when its window is on top.

What you are after, rather, is an efficient way of having the entirety of the windows of multiple apps on screen simultaneously. That's a slightly different problem. I personally get by with a combination of cascaded windows[1] and maximized windows with quick keyboard window switching.

[1] When you cascade windows such that the bottom left corner of each window forms a diagonal line across the bottom left edge of the screen, you can quickly select whatever window you want with a mouse, usually more efficiently than with a task bar, since the application identity is far more obvious when you can see a rectangle of its contents. And with choice of where each window is in the cascade order, you can get usable data out of multiple windows simultaneously.

I have found cascading to be an unhappy medium in the past. In awesome-wm, I'll tap [Win+Space] to toggle between 100% overlapped (fullscreen with unoccluded task bar) and 0% overlapped (multi-column horizontal). [Win+J] and [Win+K] cycle windows. [Win+H] and [Win+L] resize the width of the primary column in a multicolumn layout.

So let's say I have a terminal window with VIM, and a web browser with a tutorial or documentation open up to the left of it. I quickly need to scroll the web page down to continue the example, BUT the VIM window is currently focused. Assuming the web browser can be scrolled using [J] and [K], I'll simply tap [Win-K, J, Win-J] to accomplish this task while avoiding modifying the layout or leaving the home row to use a pointing device. If I don't actually need to display multiple columns at the same time, I just press the change layout key to stop using a multicolumn layout.

So as a VIM user I've been very happy with this setup in awesome-wm for the past 2+ years, but if you wish to recommend an alternative I will definitely give it an install.

edit: I was able to write a new layout function for awesome-wm which implements diagonal cascading in the manner you described and retains my keybindings. I definitely agree that cascading makes it bluntly obvious which window is the currently focused one. I'll have to play around with it more.

What does a tiling window manager give you that you can't just replicate with keystrokes that resize applications to any quadrant/half of the screen?

In a multi column layout, I might wish to alter the width of the web browser in the primary column somewhere between 30% to 68%, in 2% increments, by simply tapping [Win+L] to increase its width, or [Win+H] to decrease its width, without worrying about whether it is the focused window, and without worrying about having to focus or adjust any other window after the keystroke was made to prevent overlapping.

If you want a layout where a web browser takes up 60% of the width, and two terminals take up 20% of the width, it becomes not only possible but relatively easy.

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