Re: Thoughts on window sizing - now tiling

[Ross Smith <myxiplx googlemail com>]

>> I see this it as being a little more accessible to beginners, and
>> possibly easier to use than a standard window manager, since you can
>> choose to tile or until arbitrary sets of windows.
>
> For those familiar with overlapping windows (i.e. lots of people),
> yeah, I agree.
>
> I think the UI for attaching windows to each other would be easy to get wrong.
>
> How about: Any windows snapped together (without any special modifier)
> become tiled. There's a button on the combined title bar to separate
> them again. (The button's icon might show two windows side-by-side,
> separated by a couple of icon-pixels.)

The problem then is you're changing the default behaviour, which will
almost certainly annoy a lot of people.

A key point to the idea is that you make the gnome-shell overlay the
first place to learn about this, so that people can realize that there
are improvements to the ways they arrange windows now.  Then once they
are familiar with that, the system can teach them about holding down
Ctrl.

My preferred way to do that would be to pop up a tip notification the
2nd or 3rd time they join windows together like this - so you're just
teaching the people who are actively using it.

And once somebody has learnt about the ctrl key modifier (if that
proves possible), the nice thing is that it preserves existing
behaviour, while still making tiling very seamless.  Most of the time
you can drag windows around as normal, but any time you want to tile a
bunch together, you just hold down ctrl any time they get close.

It makes separating windows easy too - drag without ctrl and the whole
group moves.  Drag with ctrl and you split a window off.  Let go of
ctrl while dragging, and you can place that wherever you like, without
any danger of it sticking to another window by accident.