It’s actually kind of amazing to read this and realize how static these methods have been for so long. It would be a challenge to adapt to a truly new metaphor, I suspect, but probably worth the effort if it means the manager can be “smarter”. I wonder how they are going to amass enough data on user behaviour to make this truly work.

Great that they are trying new stuff and pushing the envelope, and getting inspired by tiling window managers.

Let’s see what interesting things they end up with, I wasn’t very impressed with Gnome 3’s shell, but the good thing with OSS is that I can just use MATE or cinnamon and get the old school taskbar.

I love this. Their mockup looks great.

So far the only system I’ve been pretty happy with is a manual tiling tool that I wrote myself, exec’d by my OpenBox keybindings.

I use keyboard shortcuts or dmenu to launch most apps, which are often terminals or keyboard friendly tools.

When a new window appears, it is focused. I typically immediately use Shift-Meta and the numeric keypad to move it to a zone (location & size) on the current monitor. I use Control-Shift-Meta for similar but larger overlapping zones. KP_5 is always centered and larger.

To focus windows, I use Meta and the numeric keypad, and it cycles through all the windows which are (primarily) in that zone.

Shift-Meta and a number sends a window to another virtual desktop, and Meta takes me to that desktop. Shift-Meta-O sends a window to the next monitor, if I have one attached, and Meta-O switches to the last used window on the other monitor.

This arrangement quickly became second nature and makes my life easier. I often bring one window to the center for focused work, then return it to its corner.

I’ll be bugging developers of wayland compositors until I can achieve the same there.