Re:Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager
by Barrin92 on Friday September 06, 2019 @01:39PM
(#20897789)
i3 has mouse support, you can resize windows (by default i believe it is mod + right mouse button), and i am fairly certain drag and drop will make it into the next release, if you want to use it there's already a PR on github to test it out.
Interesting to hear, thank you for the information.
Re:Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager
by virtualwhys on Friday September 06, 2019 @11:27AM
(#20896483)
i3 isn't really a Windows click-click-click style UI; you do most everything with the keyboard, including % based resizing, converting tiles to tabs or stacks, moving tiles from one section or virtual desktop to another, etc.
It's really quite a powerful and easily configurable tool, so much so that I consider it to be an absolutely indispensable part of my day-to-day computing experience (working on a Mac, for example, is just depressing in comparison).
But why? I think it would be hard to argue that the mouse isn't significantly more efficient for, e.g. resize operations than the keyboard. And you have one right there on your desk, don't you? Don't you find it to be a waste that it can't make effective use of all your input devices even in situations where they could provide advantages?
Re:Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager
by chmielewski on Friday September 06, 2019 @12:42PM
(#20897200)
Decade-long user of i3 here, I have three different keyboards (netbook to server) and three different trackpads\mouses -- the keyboard is more efficient for resize operations. I use focus-follows-mouse (agreed, why not use all devices) and fling the cursor all over the place all the time, but don't have to click and don't even have to use my fingers if I can drag my lower palm across the trackpad.
Re:Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager
by badsectoracula on Friday September 06, 2019 @01:32PM
(#20897709)
Yes i know that i3 has a lot of keyboard shortcuts, i'm saying what i'd expect it to also have in terms of mouse support - it isn't an either "this" or "that", it is both :-). One doesn't exclude the other.
For extra stuff i'd like using the wheel up/down on a title bar to minimize/restore a zone, drag-dropping a window over another window to create a zone made out of tab-like title bars, ctrl+clicking multiple titlebars to select multiple windows (so that, e.g, drag-dropping them to another zone would put all of them as tabbed windows in there or being able to close all of them either via a shortcut or via a popup menu command, and/or commands to merge them in one tabbed zone, or split tabbed zone(s) to individual zones), right clicking on a zone separator to offer a popup with commands to split/merge the zone, move the splitter at some specific percentage, etc, drag-dropping one or more windows at the edge of the screen to create a new zone (or set of zones for multiple windows).
There are so many things you can add with a mouse, especially if instead of thinking of it as a car vs horse you think of it as what it actually is: an additional input device that is right next to your keyboard and unlike the keyboard it provides precise analog input for 2D motion.
As a starting point you can check what pretty much every IDE with support for tiling does (e.g. the recent versions of Visual Studio - not VSCore, the real one).