GSoC - On-demand tiling abilities

[Hugo Chargois <gohu chargois gmail com>]

Hi,

I'm a student of ENSIIE, a computer science grande école located in Evry, France.

I'd like to participate to the GSoC for the GNOME project, working on tiling functionalities for the GNOME window manager.

To explain this shortly, it would work similarly as the tiling command
in MS windows, arranging windows side-by-side or in a stack (or maybe
even more complicated layouts...). It wouldn't be the default and only
way of displaying windows such as true tiling WMs do (xmonad, wmii...),
but offer the possibility on demand (keyboard shortcut, click
button...).

It is a feature I really miss, particularly on my netbook where
screen space is reduced and being able to maximize windows without them
overlapping would be very useful. I'm not the only one who think so,
since it is a recurrent demand on the web (according to numerous
answers to a google search such as "GNOME tiling"), and that isn't
implemented natively. There are some ways of gaining these capabilities
through the use of third-party software but nothing great, these are
quite buggy or necessitate other WMs (compiz).

Please feel free to share your opinions or suggestions on this idea !

Thanks,
Hugo Chargois.