I have a workflow that I believe is far superior to all these window managers.<p>Quake-style terminals have always been popular. I used to use Yakuake on KDE which was very convenient.<p>The convenience its not that those terminals open up with an animation (which is quite annoying). It was because there was a dedicated keyboard shortcut for them. You memorized that and you never ever think about managing the window of that application again.<p>So for years I have keyboard shortcuts assigned to my applications.<p>F1 opens Browser<p>F2 opens File manager<p>F3 opens Text Editor<p>F4 opens Chat App (Telegram)<p>F6 opens Email client<p>F7 opens ICR Client<p>F9 opens Terminal<p>F10 opens Music Player (Although Spotify on Linux has a bug that doesn't allow this to work)<p>Ever since I adopted this scheme I simply have a better quality of life during the time I'm using my computer. If there was a CPU usage for my brain, I'm sure its dropped. I strongly suggest you to try it out.<p>Because the shortcuts become muscle memory and you don't even think about them anymore. You know what you want and your fingers just know how to open it up.<p>I'm not quite sure which window managers allow this, but I'm using KWin and it allows me to arrange these shortcuts.
Wow. This is amazing, perfect keybindings.<p>Lots of keys combined with Meta(alt)+Control key, the optimum keybinding for window manager, those two keys are always unused in user programs. Its really perfect for emacs, no-one has imagined to use those two keys with some random key, on any of emacs packages or modes.<p>Poor me have binded my windowmanager commands with Super(windows) + (what ever command key I use for it.
I use my align_window3 utility on Windows: <a href="https://github.com/tom-seddon/align_window3" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tom-seddon/align_window3</a><p>It divides the screen into halves and thirds horizontally and vertically, with one keypress setting size and position on one dimension. (The recommended key settings are vaguely mnemonic, but of course you can pick pretty much anything and then get used to it through practice.)<p>I can't remember the last time I felt the need for a finer grid, but the 4x3 grid here has got me thinking that maybe it could do with an update...
This is a pretty cool idea that would really help make use of huge monitors, without the hassle of dual monitors.<p>How much would would it be to let the user custom define their grid? Ie, it's 4 * 3 by default, could we have 3 * 2 for laptop users?, or 4 * 2 for monitors turned sideways?
For OS X, I use Optimal Layout: <a href="http://most-advantageous.com/optimal-layout/" rel="nofollow">http://most-advantageous.com/optimal-layout/</a><p>Here's a screenshot of it in action: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/2N8czFR.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/2N8czFR.jpg</a> It took about five keystrokes to get the windows arranged like this. No mouse.<p>It's a product which has gotten far too little love financially compared to the value it produces. It's become an integral part of my OS X usage, and I can't imagine spending a day without it.<p>I have it set up like this:<p>Alt-1: Stretch the current window as wide and tall as possible. (Fill all available space.)<p>Alt-2: Make the current window occupy the left-half of the screen. Press Alt-2 again to occupy the right half.<p>Alt-3: Make the current window occupy the top-half of the screen. Press Alt-3 again to occupy the bottom half.<p>Alt-4: Occupy the top-right quarter of the screen. Pressing Alt-4 multiple times moves the window clockwise: bottom-right, bottom-left, upper-left, upper-right.<p>Alt-5: Center the current window, fill all vertical space, and fill 75% of total horizontal space.<p>Alt-Tab: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/SRFb16t.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/SRFb16t.png</a> Better version of Cmd-Tab. Pressing Alt-Tab once will go to the most recently active window. Twice goes to the second-most-recently active, and so on. Note that this is by <i>window</i>, not <i>application</i>. This alone is a massive improvement.<p>Alt-F: Search for a window whose title contains the specified string.<p>Remarkably, these hotkeys have never conflicted with any apps I use, and I've been using it for like two or three years.<p>The free version works just fine, but pops up a nag screen every day or so.<p>I wish it defaulted to these shortcuts, because it takes some work to set it up as I've described above. There's also no easy way for me to export and share my configuration with you. But once you've set it up this way, you'll never want to go back. OS X's maximize button is very inconsistent and it's remarkable that there's no hotkey to make the current window fill all available space.
I believe it should be easy to integrate this into xmonad by creating a few functions for that, which is the real beauty of it. The xmonad-contrib package [1] is a collection of such extensions, this one could very much join them.<p>[1]: <a href="https://hackage.haskell.org/package/xmonad-contrib" rel="nofollow">https://hackage.haskell.org/package/xmonad-contrib</a>
I've been using quicktile (<a href="https://github.com/ssokolow/quicktile" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ssokolow/quicktile</a>) for years to add tiling to desktop environments which don't provide it ootb. Also in python, and works very well.
This is pretty cool. Is there anything similar for OSX? The corner specification would come in handy on 40inch 4K monitor<p>(Currently using Hammerspoon, but use qtile on Linux)
Why isn't there a good, non-bloated, free one for Windows?<p>I try to use Windows 10's tiling, but it'll only do 4 quadrants (with variable sizes)
This is a great idea. But it seems like a job for C, since it'll be running in the background all the time and will bind to Xlib. Shouldn't be more than 200 lines of code, right? Someone should attempt this!