Why Use A Tiling Window Manager? Speed, Efficiency and Customization!

a tiling window manager why should you use one that's what we're gonna discuss today why use a tiling window manager well let's start from the beginning are you using a typical desktop environment such as kinome KDE xfce and linux of course those of you running Windows or Mac you're certainly running what I would call a standard desktop environment paradigm the Mac OS desktop environment is called aqua I think and the the desktop environment in Windows was called Luna way back in the day when I was running it back in the XP days I think since then they've had a few other desktop environment names a metro I think was what they called it in Windows 8 modern I think is what they call it now in Windows 10 but here's the question is your current desktop environment is it holding you back think about your typical workflow for a minute is your desktop a mess when you're working so you're like most people with a standard desktop environment and standard window managers do you have windows on top of windows on top of more windows I mean think about when you open up half a dozen programs your desktop is a complete mess programs get lost you're not exactly sure where your your windows are because you know they're all overlapping each other you're not even sure what order they stacked on top of each other think about when you have multiple windows open do you often you wish you just had more screen space to hold them all of course you have I know when back when I ran up floating window managers I still occasionally do live in floating window managers I often wished I just had more screen real estate for all those windows herein lies the problem your standard desktop environment and window managers they're just grossly inefficient much of this has to do because of the early desktop operating systems that many of us grew up on so for me you know the standard desktop experience and workflow that people my age know is thanks in large part to this the success of Macintosh and Windows machines back in the 80s and 90s most of the desktop since then they kind of follow that same model so what's the alternative what's the solution tiling window managers are the solution your standard desktop environment has what we call floating windows so standard desktop environments use what we call a floating window manager so your windows of course float they float along the screen you drag them with the mouse the windows can and often do overlap each other that is one of the disadvantages to using a floating window manager is that the windows can become hidden so if I opened up half a dozen or even a dozen windows on this screen most of the windows are gonna be hidden I'm gonna have no idea exactly what programs I have open unless I remember all of them many of them are just gonna be stacked on top of each other and your desktop quickly but it becomes a mess right the other thing you should notice is that these floating windows have title bars at the top of them they also have what we call window decorations such as the buttons on the side for clothes maximize minimize these are unneeded in my opinion there are our waste of space and for most tiling window managers they get rid of all the title bars and window decorations on their windows to save even more space another thing you should notice even when the windows are not overlapping so if I drag this out to the side here and I can see both windows entirely but look at all the wallpaper that is showing that is a lot of unused desktop space right this is really why floating window managers are inefficient it would be better if the file manager I have open took up one half of the screen and the terminal that I have open hooked up to the other half of the screen and there was not all this unused desktop space now again it's a very inefficient way to use the desktop having all of this unused desktop space with the exception of maybe opening a single program fullscreen and a floating window manager you're really just wasting a lot of your real estate here your screen real estate your standard desktop environment also uses what I like to call a search select and use paradigm so what I'm talking about here is your standard desktop environment gonna come with some kind of way to search for a program usually some kind of menu system whether your standard old-school menus such as in xfce here or maybe some kind of fullscreen launcher but you get in something like genome or unity and certain other desktop environments but anyway you have to search through some sort of menu system for some program to use you're not exactly sure what you're using or maybe you are and actually most people probably know exactly the program they're looking for when they go through one of these menus and this is part of one of the problems I have with this particular search select and use paradigm that most traditional desktops use is it treats the user kind of like an idiot right it treats the user almost like they have absolutely no idea what they're looking for anyway the users spent so much time cycling through menus and submenus and looking through all the programs that 99% of them are not appropriate for the task at hand then you finally find the one program that is appropriate you open that you spent you know 5 10 15 seconds cycling through all these menus to get to the program that you finally open those seconds they don't seem like a lot but they add up quickly think about those of you that use standard desktop environments or in Linux Windows Mac how often do you go to a menu to launch a program you go through a menu if you find the program you you're warming you know it takes even if you know exactly where it is in the menu system it takes a few seconds those seconds they add up quickly now a tiling window manager as the name suggests it tiles the windows rather than floats them or stacks them here in i3 that I'm using today if I wanted to launch my file manager here in i3 I'm using VI FM or a file manager I just have a hotkey for it right I didn't have to search through any menu I didn't have to waste any time it was a simple two key combination on the keyboard that took you know like a tenth of a second to hit boom I've got my file manager open that is the beauty then the speed of tiling window managers is because typically you can figure these things to launch your programs with key bindings because the things you use on a daily basis you're just gonna have them hot keyed to the keyboard because for the most part with tiling window managers it is all keyboard trippin you're gonna spend most of your time on the keyboard by default there is no wasted screen real estate and tiling window managers as you can see here in i3 I open one program it makes it fullscreen it uses all the screen real estate right it is full screen there isn't a wasted pixel on the screen right now so if I open a second program say I wanted to open up I don't know about H top you know it splits the screen in half it puts the file manager on one half and it puts H top on the other half right again no way stood space we're using the entire screen real estate here if I wanted it'll open up another program here God let's see what I want to open up here how about let's open up them again it split the screen this time it split the right-hand column in half and it avoided that half of the column up between H top and VM it is worth pointing out here I have no title bars on the windows right I have no window decorations I don't have a clothes and I maximized and a minimize button for one thing with minimize and maximize you're no longer resizing the windows and clicking on things with the mouse anyway if you want to resize the windows you can do that with the keyboard say I wanted to make my file manager a little wider so with a simple you know key combination I can you know adjust that thing however I want it anyway I don't need a close button on the windows either because again a simple key binding takes care of closing a window so in my case super shift C closes a window again closes the next window again closes to the next window so that is part of what makes tiling window managers so fast and so efficient again because you don't have that search select and use paradigm you're not fumbling through all these menus trying to discover a program to use you know it a tiling window manager assumes you know exactly what you're doing it doesn't treat you like an idiot so don't expect to have any kind of built in menu system most tiling window managers will not have any kind of built in menu system at all many won't have a built-in like command launcher or run mulcher you probably are gonna have to add a third-party run launcher if you want to use one for me I use row fee so D menu is another popular one so this is just a run command if for some reason I want to launch a program that I don't have a hotkey for I can launch row fee here and then search for it so if I didn't have a genie bokki you know I could quickly search for genie genie text editor and open that that way and then you know super shift C to close it but again I won't be using run launcher very often and if you switch to a tiling window manager you probably won't use a run launcher that often you know a couple of times a day maybe because most of the programs that you run with any sort of regularity you're probably just gonna add a key binding to it in the config file for your tiling window manager you're just gonna have everything hot keyed at least all the programs you use on a regular basis just all gonna be hot keyed your typical desktop experience though is point-and-click right it's always about pointing and clicking with the mouse with a tiling window manager this is not the case you won't be using the mouse very much everything for the most part is keyboard driven it's not like the the mouse is forbidden there is some mouse functionality you can use the mouse if you really want to it's just it's kind of inefficient and for the most part the mouse kind of gets in your way and a tiling window manager floating windows by the way even though tiling window managers of course tile you know you can tile with them there is some floating window functionality and almost every tiling window manager for example in my config I'd have VirtualBox set to be a floating window it has a floating window it even has a title bar I can grab up I could get rid of the title bar if I wanted to in the config but you know I can grab a hold of this thing and drag it just like a normal window I can eat resize this window just like a normal floating window manager or super ship see still closes it the customization possibilities with tiling window managers it's simply unrivaled by any floating window manager you will never be able to customize your your typical desktop environment and your standard floating window manager the way you can customize a tiling window manager it's just not possible now there are some caveats to those thinking to switching over to a tiling window manager honestly it's not for everyone I've got to be honest it takes patience and someone willing to take the time to acclimate themselves to using you know this foreign keyboard driven desktop it's gonna be painful it's gonna be painful at first not gonna luck but if you stick with it you might soon realize that it's much faster much more efficient and quite frankly it's easier on the wrist since you rarely handle the mouse now you're no longer always doing this plus the chicks dig it this show was made possible by ants I'm Carlos Chris Dillon Leo Robb and Tony they are the producers of this show the show was also brought to you by all those good ladies and gentlemen you see all those names on the screen they are the supporters of this channel if you would like to support my work please consider doing so you will find me at distro tube over on patreon peace guys [Music]

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 160,180

Rating: 4.6881189 out of 5

Keywords: tiling, window, manager, floating, stacking, desktop environment, i3, Linux, Mac, Windows, window manager, i3 window manager, tiling window manager, tiling window managers, window manager linux, window managers linux, xmonad, dwm, awesomewm, bspwm

Id: Lj1IfdKY0CU

Length: 12min 55sec (775 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 07 2019