They actually manage your windows.

The tiling part of it isn't the important bit: what's important is that they keep your windows placed in a useful manner for the task you're performing, tiling in various ways being one of the ways in which they achieve that.

Normal window managers are akin to a desk where everything is tossed around, whereas tiling window managers are like desks that automatically organise whatever is on them.

There's many non-tiling WMs that actually manage the windows for you:

http://fvwm.org/documentation/faq/#when-my-specific-window-o...

http://openbox.org/wiki/Help:Applications

Ah, fvwm. Now thats an old war horse of a window manager. And it is still maintained no less.

I do wonder if anything Wayland related will have such staying power.

It's indeed actively maintained!... lots of changes and updates recently. They're cleaning up the code base. After using it for over 12 years, I'm still amazed just how incredibly flexible fvwm is. You can even mimic tiling with a bit of effort (see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdSgf-IykIo ).

If you're using Linux, it's worth just trying one. On OSX, it usually means running X11 instead of the Mac display manager which is usually not really a great thing. If you're using Windows, the options are worse.

For me, the advantages of a tiling window manager [xmonad] are:

1. Keyboard control of app switching that is easy to setup in a 'habitual' configuration yet flexible enough to change on the fly.

2. The ability to quickly switch via keystroke to and from full screen views of an application. And when I switch via keystroke from the full screen view to a view of multiple applications the multiple application view is presented in a sane and consistent way right away.

3. The ability to switch via keystroke immediately to a view of two or more applications side by side or one above the other.

There is a learning curve and as with all things that occur up until the year of the linux desktop, there is a configuration curve. But basically, a tiling window manager lets me make my windows dance to whatever tune I choose.

> If you're using Linux, it's worth just trying one. On OSX, it usually means running X11 instead of the Mac display manager which is usually not really a great thing. If you're using Windows, the options are worse.

Yes and no. Windows 10 has some tiling wm features, try win-leftarrow, win-rightarrow, win-uparrow and win-downarrow.

Ed: and mouse-drag to resize the split(s).

Ed2: Also try with more than one screen. I actually think ms have struck a tremendous balance between tiling power-user, and basic computer literacy users. I still prefer a pure/proper tiling wm.

It's not xmonad, but it is an improvement.

But for Vista, I've had a daily driver with every version of Windows since 3.1. Windows 10 is a big step forward with multiple desktops. It's not comparable to Xmonad in my use case because of:

1. Xmonad's predictability.

2. Xmonad's ability to keyboard shortcut between window configurations.

3. Xmonad utilizing home position keys rather than the arrows for primary manipulation.

Anyway, the alternatives I see mentioned for Windows are based around AutoHotKey.

> On OSX, it usually means running X11 instead of the Mac display manager which is usually not really a great thing

If you're using OSX, you may want to try Amethyst[1] which provides Xmonad-like experience (at least the tiling part of it, under OSX-specific restrictions) in native Cocoa environment.

[1]: https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

There are many, here are two of my favorites:

- I can completely disable all controls, notifications, status bars and the like. This leaves me with less noise and allow me to focus on the applications at hand. But usability does not suffer, I can display whatever information I like, when I like with a simply shortcut. F.e. If I need to take a look at the date I just hit `C-t d` and it shows up.

- I can assign shortcuts to applications. For example, wherever I am, whatever is on the forefront I can hit `C-t f` and Firefox will show up, I hit it again and it will go to another Firefox window if there is one, terminal is `C-t c` and so on. I stop doing window management altogether and work on higher level.

Note also that StumpWM does manual window management, while it sounds tedious, in fact it is a delight. You have all your stuff exactly as you like it without the WM trying to guess anything.

What a tiling WM does in this situation is remove the part of the equation where you have to think about maximizing your windows. Instead of mouse interactions with GUI controls for window placement and scaling, you just use a couple of hotkeys to cycle between window layouts and navigate workspaces (i.e., if you want side-by-side windows for a moment during some task, you hit a key once or twice, then do the same to get back to maximized windows). This may not seem like it's much cognitive load to get rid of, but for me at least, going back after a few months of having the WM just handle things felt clumsy and primitive.

It will also ruin you for using most standard desktop environments, and I personally burn probably a solid day a year porting my WM config to some new environment. These have been a worthwhile trade-offs for me, but probably something to consider if you have to use systems you don't control very often.

Ah, so it's basically a commandline for window management?

It's more of a shortcut-driven automanagement of windows. When I see people in "normal" windowing environments work, the workflow goes: open an app, drag it to the correct monitor and corner of that monitor, and then optionally manually resize it. Bonus points for taking a few seconds to fish for the exact edge of the window's frame when resizing. Or misclicking when aiming for the title bar and opening a menu instead or hiding the window because you clicked on some other window it was hovering over.

Tiling window managers: open application, and the window manager puts it in a sensible position most of the time. Use shortcuts to quickly correct its placement, if necessary. Typically shortcuts are something like

- switch to master pane (the biggest pane on the screen)

- push left/right/up/down

- push to another desktop or screen

- make fullscreen

In terms of a command line metaphor, it is the keyboard shortcuts for accessing history or editing the text of a command. It is not a command line in the sense of options to grep.

But what it is most like (switching to simile) is Emacs window manager...by which I mean that Emacs uses a tiling window manager.

I'd say it's more like a terminal multiplexer for window management, if you're familiar with screen or tmux. (Using XMonad for windows and using tmux for collections of shells / terminal apps have followed similar tracks in my life.)

Your windows will never overlap. If you always have your windows maximized, then you can definitively benefit from a tiling window manager since it will always open new windows maximized.

I also have my windows maximized and have each window assigned to a different workspace. Switching is as easy as pressing alt + 1, alt + 2, etc ... (in i3wm)

It's kind of like having everything maximized, but more flexibly. For example:

* You can have two editor windows "maximized" into two halves of your screen, letting you compare things side-by side

* Expanding on the above, my typical development workflow on my laptop is to dedicate one half to an editor window, then split the other half, with the top for git (I use Emacs w/ Magit) and the bottom for a terminal window (usually for actually running my project). I'll then add editor windows to the left half and terminal windows to the bottom-right as needed. All windows are maximized into their little compartments.

* Your "maximize everything" workflow is actually the default in StumpWM (which doesn't split windows unless you tell it to split windows), and is how I typically work when I don't need to be viewing multiple things at once.

The main advantage I find is that I don't need to use the mouse to manage my windows. I split my screen to have my emacs session and terminal/browser etc., side-by-side. I can move the windows using key bindings: snap them, split the screen etc.,.

Also extremely light-weight when compared to DEs like Unity/Gnome.

Maximize stops to make sense at some point when your screen gets large enough. You can have at least two windows side by side and maybe a console below without having to sacrifice some sidebar in your IDE or whatever.

I have the habit of maximizing the browser on windows, but on most pages that leaves a lot of empty space to the sides that isn't used anyway.

Under i3 on the other hand I keep the browser on maybe 1/3rd of the screen width because managing the whole layout (not just one window at a time) is so much easier.

And the alternative, overlapping/floating rarely seems useful for me.

They're simpler than desktop environments in every way.

I have found that I use 10% and absolutely require 0% of the larger DEs' features, so using a simpler system makes sense.

Your use case seems like it would work well with tiling window managers, since you can just arrange things so that you have a single fullscreen window per workspace.

Sounds good.

I think I'll try them :)

I guess the performance impact of these WMs is smaller than with full blown desktop environments?

They are typically lighter, but may not have as much "fancy" features such as GL-rendering and HW-compositing.

Basically don't bother if your main objective is for things to be "faster".

These are all about efficient and keyboard-driven UX.

my main objective isn't "faster", but one of my objectives is "not slower" :D

>I guess the performance impact of these WMs is smaller than with full blown desktop environments?

Yes, although with modern processors, GPUs and memory prices that is probably not an issue.

I use Xfce for a few years now, that's why I'm asking.

I used Xfce and switched to i3. I can't imagine going back whenever I'm in Linux. My work environment is MacOS and its frustrating having to manually move windows and like others have said is just plain clunky after having used a tiling window manager. It did take a bit of time to get used to i3, but once I did it was glorious.