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A glance to the side is much faster and easier than pressing physical buttons
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You can see stuff with your peripheral vision. With alt-tab, you don’t see if anything is happening at all
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Alt-tab is linear, screens are 2d
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You can’t tile absolutely everything unless your screen is huge and has very high resolution, at which point it turns into rich people’s version of multi-monitor setup, since a bunch smaller screens are much cheaper than single big one
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Alt-tab list changes constantly. But some apps are likely to be constantly there, you can throw them on separate screens and unclutter the main one by doing so
Alt-tab was my very last use-case because I literally have bindings to pull up my main programs.
As someone who has gone from tiling(i3), to floating (stump), to tiling again (i3/sway), and finally back to floating (awesome) - I can say floating wins in terms of predictability. You press a button to focus on your desired window and your entire desktop does not need to convulse to accommodate for it.
Floating window managers win on speed and predictability, and I’m wondering now if this is causing the rift in single/multi monitors in this discussion chain.
I didn’t really mean “tile” as in tiling WM, more like that if you’re this type of guy, then you could just just put everything you’d ever need somewhere on one screen, never maximize anything, and then nothing’s ever going to be out of sight.
My setup is mostly static, with 6 screens, so I rarely even switch windows on screen. I’ve got top-left for whatever is making sounds - music, movies, youtube, etc. Top-right is for the stock charts. Left is for comms - I’ve got all chats tiled up in there, but if I’m in the videocall I’ll fullscreen that, or, if I’m focusing, I put documentation and references there. Middle for IDE, right for the app I’m working on and a front-end debugger. There’s also bottom screen for a back-end debugger, a live database view and a small log tail. Top two screens are stationary that I only use at home, so I don’t need them when I’m out working. The rest are set up so that I don’t ever have anything important out of view. It’s exceptionally good when I’m debugging - I can see, live, absolutely everything that’s going with the app, from rendered page down to db data, click through steps and instantly see what happens where. It also saves me some time, as with one screen I would sometimes forget I was debugging after doing something different in IDE, and then wonder why tf is my app not responding. With debug always open this is never the case. I also set up win+WASD to jump between windows by direction, which in most cases means jumps between screens, so win+w - space would stop whatever is making a noise. When I’m off work, I usually surf or game on my middle screen, tops stay the same, so does the left, bottom switches to PC performance metrics, and right usually has something that controls the PC itself, like fan curves or sound mixer. Surely I could do with a single screen, and I actually went single-multiple-single-multiple before. The second cycle really taught me some window discipline. On the first go at multi-screen I got a short boost of productivity but then fell into a pit where I would have stuff all over the place, constantly switching and leaving apps forgotten on others. It wasn’t until after returning to single that I’ve realized exactly what I want out separated and consistent in one place.
floating (awesome)
Did you seriously set up awesome as a floating window manager? You monster! Jk, do whatever fits you
Ah I see what you mean by tiling. Still, such a setup feels… excessive, no? I can completely understand that you literally never need to pull up anything since it’s all just there, but I dunno (I’m reaching here) doesn’t your machine get hot from all the displays and forcing all screens to do constant screen updates?
It just seems unneccesary to me (like I said, I’m judgemental on this front). When you have to travel, you can’t take all that with you – so working on a laptop at the airport must be incredibly frustrating if you’re used to things just being there, no?
Did you seriously set up awesome as a floating window manager?
Haha, yes, the other layouts are wasted on me. Ideally a dwm desktop would suit me fine, but I enjoy the Lua extensibility.
