Way back in time, I fell in love with certain yellow tabbed windows. I think more than a few here have as well. Over the life of these promising UI delights, many improvements have been made. Some, such as stack and tile, have pushed this GUI ever closer to it’s potential.
More recently in time, I have discovered keyboard driven tiling window managers. I have grown to love these as well. If you are unsure of what a tiling window manager is, I suggest looking into them. They are great UI tools.
We have a solid basis for kicking our UI up a notch, without invasively interfering with the GUI we all love. We have stack and tile. We have Shortcuts prefs. We have the “hey” scripting language. We have an excellent native messenging and general programming API.
I think these elements could be combined in such a way that we could both automate, and use the efficiency of key strokes to drive the GUI in an ergonomic and efficient manner, similar to tiling window managers. Totally native. Maximize use of screen space, automate boring window management, make workflows more efficient, be the envy of power nerds and productivity hounds everywhere. All without scrapping the current UI.
Does anyone else like this idea? If so, then discuss. I’ve been kicking this idea around for awhile now. Any ideas on best practices on implementing this are welcome. Also what are some pitfalls to watch out for?
It seems a popular request in tech conferences when we show Haiku (maybe second to “does it have a textmode”). But I’m not sure this is representative of our target users.
In my case, I’m still running Haiku on a rather small 1280x768 display, so tiling is of little use in this case. My workflow is rather a mix of fullscreen windows, and smaller overlapping windows, and workspaces to organize it all and more easily switch contexts.
However, I also occasionally run Haiku on a larger 1920x1080 display, and there, having multiple windows on display makes more sense. I’m not sure I would go for a fully tiling window manager, however. I prefer to have each window be the right size (just large enough to show its contents), and then lay them out manually according to my needs.
i use stacking and tiling to customize workflows and spaces – it makes doing anything at all much easier. being able to script it and save configurations would go a long way. i’ve mostly used haiku on smaller screens but even in that case have had plenty use for stacking and tiling.
Windows does this kind of half way ok, with it’s drag it to a corner take a quarter of the screen… tiling makes it a bit better since you only have to drag the single border to resize both windows but it lacks the maximize to a quarter or half of the screen aspect which is pretty useful.
I typically have 2 screens and at least on windows 7 it can’t maximise to a quarter of the screen to the center of the two screens… I think windows 10 can do that though.