GSoC - On-demand tiling abilities

[Hugo Chargois <hugo chargois free fr>]

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.