An introduction to tiling WMsĪ tiling WM does not place windows as floating entities, but as non-overlapping rectangular tiles (think of tiles on a wall), which are part of a larger rectangle (think of the wall itself, or in this case, your monitor). These are precisely the areas where tiling WMs shine. Generally, the larger the monitor, the more you will find the need to get acquainted with keyboard shortcuts instead of using the mouse. Anyone with a display larger than, say, 45.72 cm (18 inches) would have felt the pain of having to move the mouse from one corner of the screen to another, and then back to the initial position - a fairly typical motion on a Windows PC, where the Start menu is in the bottom-left corner of the screen, and the min/max/close buttons at the top-right corner of a maximised window. Even if you have all the open windows arranged the way you want, you will still have to go through the resize-move-rinse-repeat rigmarole each time you add or remove windows from the layout.Īnother problem is the over-reliance on the mouse. Having to manually move and resize windows to prevent them from covering the mission-critical parts of one another can get pretty tiresome, once you have more than a handful open. The idea of having freely floating windows means that they can (and will) overlap each other. The main problem with floating WMs is the fact that they are not really designed to facilitate side-by-side viewing of more than one window. The floating approach to window management has been the most widely used (even Windows and Mac use it), but it has some fundamental flaws, which most of you might have experienced at some point or the other.

As the name implies, they represent windows as floating rectangles on the desktop - freely resizeable and movable. All the WMs mentioned earlier are the floating variety. In this article, I will cover two kinds of WMs - floating and (surprise!) tiling.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that there are a variety of WMs.

Windows tiling window manager