I was a bit confused at first. When he said tiling windows with the gnome terminal I thought, "is this just a GNU screen tutorial with a buzz-words title?" When I saw the browser windows in there I started to wonder how you embedded a browser into a gnome-terminal tab.
It took watching the video to see that it was more integrated than I first expected.
Looks good. There seems to be a lot of experimentation with tiling wm-s, even win8 seems to be going in that direction if I saw those videos right. Change is good.
I think more people should write similar extensions or even new
window managers. In my opinion, “traditional” window management is
quirky, even if we've all grown used to it. Resizing and moving
windows, for example, are painful given how you need to click on
small specific areas to carry them out. Most window managers on
Linux have overcome with a combination of a key press and mouse
click allowing you to move/resize by clicking anywhere in the
window. With a tiling window manager you usually have some
keyboard shortcut to do it.
Still, none of those approaches solve the problem in all
situations. Managing windows can be “uncomfortable”. Sure you can
make use of workspaces, or tags (à la dwm, I think the tag
paradigm is beautiful) or whatnot, but you don't want to think
about the act of switching windows. Have you ever found yourself
alt-tabbing through a pile of windows and be annoyed by not
getting to the right window easily enough (“Oh, drat, I pressed
Tab one too many times”). Whenever I have to use OS X, I press the
Exposé shortcut for almost every context switch.
So yeah, this is kind of extension is more than welcome and others should continue to innovate. If nothing else good comes out of Gnome 3, at least it would have pushed people to think about their interaction with the interface.
Why is that, by the way? I've tried various transitions over the years and for any serious work I've soon settled for the plain old immediate "transition", i.e. nothing at all. Anything else has turned out just annoying, for me.
At a largely Windows-based shop I installed Linux on my system and had Gnome set up with some fancy 3d-box transitions. I got some startled wows from my coworkers when they were helping me with something over my shoulder and I switched desktops.
However, I always found myself reducing the transition time bit by bit, until I eventually got rid of the transition. When I'm in the zone and coding I might be checking docs or some output on one workspace, and I want to switch workspaces and begin typing without the feedback delay. I already have the next 20 keystrokes planned out, and I'd rather be rate limited by my fingers than my WM.
You certainly want to eventually get rid of all the transitions when you've learned to use a WM instinctively, but for newbies they can provide valuable feedback.
Or you could show a single window on both monitors (if you have two), for example, xmobar. Or you could resize the windows as bitmaps instead of resizing app size into grotesque values (150x150 pixel browser?) in various tiling layouts. Not that this allows it right now, but working composite manager (and the compositing manager in gnome3 is good, compared to its alternatives) is required for that.
A few differences, yeah. You get to keep the gnome bling (eg the overlay window). It also supports direct manipulation (mouse moving / resizing) and overlapping windows. Oh, and compositing works.
A sensible tiling window manager doesn't tile popup windows (and I believe xmonad is sensible). If it doesn't float popups, then you just haven't configured it to do so. Can't blame you, though. Writing Haskell to configure a window manager isn't exactly a one-step process. I think parts of the following resource will prove useful if you ever decide to give xmonad another try: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/General_xmonad.hs_...
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 72.2 ms ] threadAlso, if I start gnome-terminal, run tmux, and put it full-screen.. isn't it a "gnome tiling manager" ?
It took watching the video to see that it was more integrated than I first expected.
Still, none of those approaches solve the problem in all situations. Managing windows can be “uncomfortable”. Sure you can make use of workspaces, or tags (à la dwm, I think the tag paradigm is beautiful) or whatnot, but you don't want to think about the act of switching windows. Have you ever found yourself alt-tabbing through a pile of windows and be annoyed by not getting to the right window easily enough (“Oh, drat, I pressed Tab one too many times”). Whenever I have to use OS X, I press the Exposé shortcut for almost every context switch.
So yeah, this is kind of extension is more than welcome and others should continue to innovate. If nothing else good comes out of Gnome 3, at least it would have pushed people to think about their interaction with the interface.
However, I always found myself reducing the transition time bit by bit, until I eventually got rid of the transition. When I'm in the zone and coding I might be checking docs or some output on one workspace, and I want to switch workspaces and begin typing without the feedback delay. I already have the next 20 keystrokes planned out, and I'd rather be rate limited by my fingers than my WM.
Plus, the floating mode isn't bad ;)
Had to hack it up a bit to show the shift key, and only the most recent keypress.
And gnome-shell-list has built in screen recording.
I tried to use the tiling window manager xmonad and found it excellent for terminal stuff. The problem was everything else.
Firefox/thunderbird/etc. don't work in a tiling window manager, particularly Firefox and particularly popups.