And omg! I have slept on this feature for so long. I assumed it was just dragging windows to corners and they snap on to the left or right back or top. Then, I installed PopOS and saw an explicit button to turn on windows tiling but I was already using the drag function, so I was confused. I turned it on and omg! I have not felt more stupid and happily surprised by a piece of tech in a while. It just works. I don’t have to be worry about arranging windows a special way for multitasking or for following guides. So much time saved.
How to make the most of it? Have you had a similar experience with something?
I don’t know how anyone does anything with tiling windows. They must all be sooooo small…
You don’t usually have them all open at the same time, you minimize some. Or maybe you add more monitors.
So you never have >2 windows open?
It depends, up to four works for some apps depending on monitor size, but otherwise I do the same thing as @Nibodhika@lemmy.world.
Overlapping window managers, the most common type in use by far, just seem crazy to me. Windows almost never use the available monitor space, and they have to constantly be wrangled around each other so that… you can drag something instead of using the clipboard, I guess?
That’s where workspaces come in place, I usually have a single full screen application per workspace, so Meta+1 is my browser, Meta+3 is my IDE, Meta+4 is slack, etc. Some workspaces have more than one application, e.g. I usually keep a few terminals in Meta+2.
This means that I usually work with things occupying all of my screen and in a short keystrokes I’m in whatever I want to be. But if I ever need to open a terminal or a random application it will occupy half my screen and whatever I was doing would resize to the other half, so I never have to grab my mouse to move stuff over to be able to see what I was doing.
Forgive my ignorance but doesn’t that just defeat the purpose?
Nope, they complement each other, you can have workspaces in non tiling window managers, but they’re a must in tiling ones. But the tiling does play a very crucial part, for example my workspace that has the terminals can have several terminals depending on what I’m doing, and being able to open/close terminals and having the remaining adjust is a big part of why I use a tiling window manager. It’s just efficient because 99% of the time when you have 2 apps open you want to look at both simultaneously, so not having to move stuff around with the mouse makes that easier, and for the remaining 1% you just move the app you don’t currently care about to another workspace, so it’s somewhere easily accessible when you want to.
At most I have about 3 windows open at a time per workspace with 4 workspaces being used at a time for specific tasks. With the combo of tiling and workspaces I have never run into an instance of “clutter” on my desktop. This is off a single monitor setup too that I also use on my laptop.