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Comment by dhruvmittal | Hacker News Reader

The single biggest thing I miss when I use OS X is alt+click to move windows.

Since I switched to a window tiler, I never need to move windows unless I'm doing something complex in GIMP. I'm using pytyle2 (you can probably find something better) and mostly all I use is alt-c to rotate the windows, alt-h for "higher" and alt-l for "lower" and that's it. Now I rarely, rarely ever resize or click-drag a window.

This works so well I totally stopped using window decoration. Having the extra pixels on my laptop is nice! Install the "Classic Compact" add-on for Firefox to free up even more pixels.

I've always loved tiling WMs on big screens, since it's a really efficient way to use all of that screen real estate. i3 really comes into its own on my multimonitor desktop setup. I've just never felt any real gain on anything smaller than 17". On my 13" macbook air, however, I find that as soon as I split the screen 50-50 neither window really has enough space to be comfortable. (I've tried using Amethyst[1], but that's all)

[1]: https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

That's true. My next laptop will be bigger! For now I have good eyes to see the 7px fonts. And it was some real work to remove all the window decorations, editing config files to get a slim profile on everything. Usually I have my code on one side and a browser on the other side. When it gets tight I have 3 options: 1. zoom out the browser (not always an option for detail work) 2. flip the important activity to the bigger window 3. use the higher/lower hotkeys to give one side or the other more/less room. Typically I do not like to write code in the left panel because then my eyes are way off to the side. Took me years to get to this point with Linux but I feel very productive now when I sit down to work. I had to ditch Fedora/Gnome, figure out Crunchbang, pytyle2 was a pain to install, etc. But it was all worth it, at least in my opinion ;-)

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