Unlike traditional (stacking) window managers, like Windows or GNOME, where you have to manually manage window placement, a tiling window manager automatically handles window placement. I found tiling window managers save me a lot of time because most of the time I want a simple two pane side by side arrangement of windows.

Like most people, I’ve only ever used stacking window managers which are a design that came out in the early 1980s from Xerox Parc (This demo of the Xerox Star computer is fabulous). This type of interface invokes a literal desktop where your documents (windows) are like actual sheets of paper scattered over your physical desktop. You can place the windows where ever you want and size them however you want, and many people like this freedom to organize things.

One downside of stacking window managers is that it can get tedious to arrange all the papers on your desk, so to speak, especially if there are a lot of papers (open windows) and if you don’t want a finely tuned layout.

My most common mode of working is to have two windows open side by side, with code in one pane and documentation/research in the other. This became my preferred way of working once I got an external monitor with a 16:9 aspect ratio. My current laptop also has a 16:9 ratio.

There is another flavor of window manager called a tiling window manager which imposes an order to how the windows are arranged on screen, without any overlaps. They work by fitting windows into predefined divisions of the screen, like half, quarter etc.

Fortunately GNOME has a plugin system, and one plugin, Forge. is a tiling window manager, making it easy to try it out without making big changes. Because Forge is a plugin, Ubuntu allows me to disable it whenever I want. I had a brief go with the Awesome tiling window manager but it required me to not use GNOME and it was too much of a change at one go.

I found it just right for my use.

When I open two windows they go side-by-side just as I need them. If I want to exclusively work on one window or the other, I simply “maximize” it, When I’m done, I un-maximize it, and, unlike a stacking window manager, the windows go back to being side by side.

When I temporarily open extra windows, the manager usefully splits one or the other half of the screen, and if I don’t like which, I simply drag the window around to the correct split or use hotkeys to move the windows from one tile to another.

If I temporarily have to open a bunch of file explorer windows, the tiling can get in the way (they default to tiny little windows arrange in some quarter of the screen) and I either open them in a new workspace or disable tiling temporarily.