X Obstinate Asymmetric Tiler
- Designed for wide screens, including multi-head support.
- Static tiling; you choose three fixed tiles at build-time.
- Windows never move between tiles or monitors automatically.
- Bare minimum EWMH to support panels and simpleswitcher.
- A few keyboard controls for moving, focusing, cycling, closing, and finding windows.
- Transient windows and dialogs are centered on parent, not tiled.
- Splash screens and notification popups are displayed as requested, not tiled.
- config.h for customization of borders and keys.
- Layout is chosen at build time.
- Tile proportions can be adjusted.
- Can be flipped horizontally.
- Xrandr rotated monitor also rotates layout (always 90 degrees, right).
...
--------------------------------- ---------------------------------
| | | | | |
| | | | | |
| | 2 | | 2 | |
| 1 | | | | 1 |
| |---------| |---------| |
| | | | | |
| | 3 | | 3 | |
--------------------------------- ---------------------------------
--------------------- ---------------------
| | | | |
| | | 3 | 2 |
| | | | |
| 1 | |-------------------|
| | | |
| | | |
| | | |
| | | |
|-------------------| | 1 |
| | | | |
| 3 | 2 | | |
| | | | |
--------------------- ---------------------
- Asymmetric tiling layouts are more useful than symmetric ones.
- A master/stack layout is fine but only if the stack is itself asymmetric.
- Static tiling is more practical than dynamic tiling or floating.
- Windows moving and resizing without user input is bad.
- Having a choice of tiling layouts at run time is distracting.
- Apps that remember their size can handily be placed back in the correct tile.
- Three tiles suffice because:
- App windows are always one of four types:
- Large work-being-done apps
- Medium monitoring-something apps
- Small background-chat-music apps
- Apps people should not use ;-)
- Want more tiles? Buy more monitors!
- App windows are always one of four types:
- Keyboard controls generally preferred over the mouse, when practical.
- Faster. Muscle memory.
- Click-to-focus model preferred over focus-follows-mouse.
- FfM means mentally keeping track of the mouse or warping the pointer around.
- CtF is harder to get wrong and makes it easy to forget about the mouse for some tasks.
- 2/3 is a nice fraction.
All customization happens in config.h. See in-line comments there. It's tracked, so use a local git branch or a merge tool to protect any customization.