The "half-maximized" feature sounds great, and one of the things that I feel like no one has right, still. Windows has actually gotten pretty good, surprisingly (drag to corners to get a quarter screen window, drag to sides to get half screen). Gnome is clumsier than I'd like. I really would love a window manager that handles tiling well, but doesn't require complete buy-in to a fully tiled concept. I doubt I'll be going back to Window Maker for this (I used it up until switching briefly to Enlightenment and then on to various Gnome standard window managers....Sawfish, and some others), but it seems like it's reasonably well thought out implementation.
Also, I find it really funny when a project has been around for decades, and has been regarded as stable for nearly as long, and still hasn't done a 1.0 release.
Unfortunately in Window Maker the left/right edges of the screen move a window to another virtual desktop (by default), so this would have to be limited to the top or bottom edges which do not seem to have an action tied to them so far.
And you can left click and middle click the maximize button on a window title bar to maximize it on the vertical and horizontal axises only. Combined with edge snapping making it easy to move a window on only one axis at that point, you can set up a few column tiles that way very easily.
Funny memory: I've been a KDE developer for 12 or 13 years. I think one of my first patches ever was a fix for the window manager to restore to correct window geometry when cancelling a partially maximized state using the restore action. A friend of mine was using the above feature to set up tiled text editors and I wanted to fix it for him.
I knew about and use the hell out of the Win+Arrow combo... but I didn't know you could drag to corners/sides to get the same effect.
Always nice to have alternatives - and I'm always dragging stuff around to different windows so it'll be nice to not have to drag, drop and then window key stuff.
I'm going to plug my dispswitch program (https://github.com/tom-seddon/dispswitch - Windows only. You run it from a hotkey manager such as AutoHotKey). It does a better job of preserving monitor-relative size and position when you've got monitors with work rects of different sizes.
For tiling windows, try align_window3 (https://github.com/tom-seddon/align_window3 - again, it's for Windows, and use AutoHotKey). It gives you more portrait-friendly options than the Windows default stuff.
> I really would love a window manager that handles tiling well, but doesn't require complete buy-in to a fully tiled concept.
I use OpenBox and awesomewm together. I can tile if I want, but I also have access to a more traditional approach.
Because of OpenBox's configuration of everything, I can often link the two together to do fun things like, tile all windows equally around my active window, that I can drag and resize as I like.
I use a similar application AltDrag. I can't live without it. I of course set it to the Win Key instead of Alt, as Alt key is used heavily in Blender and some other of the software that I use.
Yes, I know :). Taekwindow adds X11-like behaviour with ALT+left/right click drag to move/resize. Also let's you have scroll-under-cursor instead of scroll-focused-window behaviour.
So it's entirely complementary, and you can customise to your liking.
Personally I find Magnet[1] (for Mac) to be wonderful, it moves your windows around to halves, thirds, and two-thirds presets with either dragging or keyboard shortcuts.
AwesomeWM is both a tiling and floating WM. It has this feature (including snap to corner for 1/4). Awesome is a window manager framework allowing its users to be pretty much anything they want.
Moom for Mac is great with near perfect functionality. Hover over the "Fullscreen" button and you can select by a customizable grid for size and placement. Also quick half sized options.
Argh! Yet another incredible piece of software I never heard of until stumbling across the posts here in a HN thread. Why is finding these great pieces of software so hard!
Another fan here. There are other small utilities that provide the same functionality, but Moom is best to me because it doesn't hijack screen edges/corners, preventing accidental maximizing and playing more nicely with a workflow with an even mix of maximized and odd-sized windows.
drag to corners to get a quarter screen window, drag to sides to get half screen
Incidentally, that behaviour was one of the first things I had to figure out how to turn off in Windows, because I just wanted to move the window there; I did NOT want to resize it. I found it quite annoying.
Cinnamon has similar "drag to edge" tiling as Windows, and you can also configure keyboard shortcuts for it - I have win+arrow keys configured to move windows to the edges/corners.
Feeling nostalgic ... Window Maker was my window manager of choice per year (up to the GNOME 1 days when it was still easy to run gnome-panel on top of WM).
The NeXTSTEP way in which menus can be triggered by right-clicking is really usable - I only wish it's possible to attach the app menu bar as well. The global menu bar approach of macOS and GNOME can feel a bit ridiculous on large displays.
The basic task of Wayland is to facilitate that a program (most commonly a DE compositor/WM) can draw on the screen using the GPU without the programmer having to write OpenGL code.
> I only wish it's possible to attach the app menu bar as well. The global menu bar approach of macOS and GNOME can feel a bit ridiculous on large displays.
I personally disagree. It's still highly relevant to be able to "slam" the pointer upward to always land on the menu bar.
Problem is returning to where you came from again.
RISC OS has the best menus, just click the mouse button anywhere in the window, maximum Fitts score, and you can select menu items and keep the menu open to select more, also select a menu item that has a submenu, and have windows as submenus, for palette selection etc
>Problem is returning to where you came from again.
I have cursor speed set high on all of my machines for this very reason. Easy to slam edges, minimal movement to get back to where you started. It takes a day or so to adjust to being precise with small hand movements, but it was totally worth it, at least for me.
My day to day pointing device is a trackball (CST L-Trac) but I occasionally use a mouse and the trackpad on my MBP. At one point I used a dell precision laptop with a trackpoint. Pointer speed is high on all of them, and I used to use hot corners but now the only corner I use is bottom left for screen lock.
As someone still using Window Maker, these mini-DockApps are a a reason why I keep using it. The dock is on the left or right, so it does not take the more precious vertical screenspace. And dockapps are reasonably sized (64x64 pixels by default) and thus can show useful information. I am especially fond of one showing CPU activity like blobs in a lava lamp (wmforkplop).
I also got very used to the way WM does virtual desktops, though KDE can be configured to behave nearly identical by now.
A unique feature to Window Maker's virtual desktops is the clip. The clip basically allows you to create a kind of separate dock per virtual desktop so if you have a separate VD per type of task (e.g. web, chat, code, art, media, games, etc) you can put the relevant launchers on the clip instead of the dock and leave only the global stuff (like docklets and utilities like a terminal, notepad, file browser, etc) in the dock.
I actually ignored that for years, until i decided to try it out and found it much easier to work with since i could create many more launchers than if i had to fit everything in the regular dock (of course i could also use drawers - which sadly are not yet supported by the clip - but i think having the launchers per virtual desktop is better).
A number of the older WMs are not entirely dissimilar. Some aren't, though. FVWM for example has a grid rather than flat layout, which I find confusing (you might go left/right, you might go up/down). The boxes generally struck me as pretty good -- Blackbox I think most especially.
KDE comes close to WindowMaker in functionality (I've been watching/using that occasionally since ~1999), but never quite seems to get it right. KDE's windowlist, for example, isn't pinnable, and if you're walking that, you have to re-open, and re-acquire your current working spot, for each window you're traversing. That extra bit of friction rubs me raw every damned time.
The crazy thing about WindowMaker, for me, is how for such a ... not particulalry beautiful* desktop (though I find its asthetics completely acceptable), it's so damned useful. It's either exceptionally well designed ... or I've just got it cold-welded to my muscle memory. I couldn't honestly tell you which.
(Though I think its design is particularly good, with its design stability a major part of that.)
Window Maker was my first encounter with virtual desktops and since I started using it I can no longer imagine working efficiently without virtual desktops. Was Window Maker the first manager that had virtual desktops?
The first time I have seen virtual desktops was on a UNIX workstation running the FVWM window manager in 1995, a couple of years before Window Maker's inital release.
My first encounter with virtual desktops was on AfterStep, and later on I migrated to Window Maker as it was becoming more popular in Brazil. But I think CDE had virtual desktops long before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment
Window Maker was one of the reason why I decided to start using Linux back in 1999. I was running Windows 98 back then, and I was so taken by the style of the different window managers available for Linux. I marveled at how flexible Enlightenment looked and fvwm either looked like crap or like a work of art depending on the time the user spent in his configuration file.
But by far, my favorite look was Window Maker. I liked the large icons, the blocky menu, and the intriguing dockapps. After I managed to install Linux (that was a hard task for a 16 year-old who couldn't read English), I used Window Maker for a number of years. It was fast, it was functional, and it was really cool! These days I use LXDE with Openbox, but I'm always thrilled to hear about new developments in Window Maker.
This brings back memories. I have screenshots of my desktop running Window Maker from 1997 (on a SparcStation). Guess I could start using it again, after 20 years :-)
I love WM. I hope they stay off the radar though. If it ever picks up any momentum, RedHat or the Gnome team are going to move in and start "improving" it.
Windows 95 and 98 worked pretty well with alternative shells. I think originally the option was there just so users could run the classic 3.x shell (progman.exe I think it was called) but it was pretty trivial to write you own ones; as I often did when I was bored.
You couldn't do much to change the title bars et al though.
I don't think this is anymore a valid concern. From the Wayland FAQ:
"How can I replace Wayland's Window Manager?
The Wayland architecture integrates the display server, window manager and compositor into one process. You can think of Wayland as a toolkit for creating clients and compositors. It is not a specific single compositor or window manager. If you want a different window manager, you can write a new one. A 'libweston' effort is underway in order to allow new environments to reuse Weston's codebase and mechanics, whilst providing their own look and feel."
There's a handful of Wayland compositor frameworks - including one built by the KDE project - and Weston provides an interface by which custom UIs can be created. I don't think there's going to be much of an issue, aside from potential problems with the spec itself.
Some of them can still be found if you look around on Google. Unfortunately, they haven't aged well -- their wallpapers are mostly for 4:3 monitors and low resolutions, the textures are for low-res screens etc..
Yeah, you're right. Back in 2001-2002 people would walk by my computer screen and be impressed, ask, "What OS is that??" Now the other OSes have caught up in appearance.
Also, I find it really funny when a project has been around for decades, and has been regarded as stable for nearly as long, and still hasn't done a 1.0 release.