This theme came up again today, so I thought it might be worth hearing
what others thought about it. I've been with i3wm for about 6 months now,
and I am extremely happy about not just i3wm, but the tiling paradigm in
general. This was the first such wm for me. Why it took so long to get
here, I don't know. I would like to thank the complete implosion into
darkness that has taken place in the world of "traditional, non-tiling
desktop computing" for helping me to find what was lost to start with.
Anyway, as a developer, I more and more look at i3/tiling wm as a
continuation of the "operating system is the ide" paradigm lost to much
of the non-*nix world. This same narrative of course applies to many work
flows. The observation I'm blabbing about now is that so many
applications leverage in-application tiling as a UI paradigm, yet
ironically would actually be better of being (or at least supporting)
multi-window UIs so as to keep uniform tiling semantics across all
running applications.
I used to say that the most important reason to support multi-window was
to support multi-head displays. That is still true, but consistent-tiling
is even a bigger one. Plus of course, when you are on a system with a
small screen, you would rather cycle through all of an application's
internal tiles as full screen windows. This is further irony since a
unified strategy for supporting small and large screen environments was
one of the core reasons for the aforementioned "great desktop environment
meltdown" of the early 2010s.
So really, good work. It's just so different to be getting happier about
something in computing (especially ui related) than more disgusted. Now,
I just need to wait another 8-15 years for everyone else to realize the
"browser is the epicenter of the universe" model has long since jumped
the shark.
