Freedom in movements

Sorry for a big delay. I was busy because I got married. The second article in this blog will be about a freedom. Oh no! I see your smile about this. One more article about open source and sucked Windows. You are wrong. This is not a blog about holy wars.

Let's try to understand how many freedom you can got in your window management.

Stacked style

Or "Windows/Mac/KDE/Ubuntu" style. Or if you want to be polite to history "Xerox Alto" style.  

I don't want to repeat Wikipedia article, so you can read this one. But if you think that you experienced enough to know what I mean lets try to extract some key feature of this kind.

1. You can overlap your windows. Even hide one behind others.
2. You can change size of your windows.
3. You can move then to any place.
4. You can have many windows.

Something like this is normal for such kind. But there is a  trouble..

You need to organized everything manually with help of mouse. So if you want to have three windows in same moment  you have to change size and place them manually. Some window managers like Explorer in Windows allow you to have some helpers in such  situations. They have show all and side by side functions, but there are not so many variants, because it's just a helpers. More then it. You will have a lot of work again, if you open one more window.

And this is a real freedom which as usual has a cost. Of cause you can tell that you open not so many windows and it's OK for you to modify your windows every time you open it. But in my case it was a pain when I have to use Windows. Just imaging to open Putty to different destinations something about 100 or 200 times in day. It's was a nightmare. That is why I managed to find another way.

One window style 

It's extreme case when you have only one window in same moment. iPad or something like this is example of that style. But funny thing is that most people use stacked manager in one window mode. They have all windows maximized and switch between them over task panel or shortcuts. In Russia we say, "to nail using microscope".  This is powerful solution but it looks odd.

Tiling style

Again you'd better to read wiki. Tiling window managers have a lot of difference between each other. So you can't say in which way they work until you try it but they have some limitations compared to stacked managers.

1. You can't overlap windows. Never. It's main idea.
2. In most cases you can't change size of one window, but can change size of some group of windows. 
3. You can move them, but only to some places in some grid or tree depends on realization.
4. You can have many windows. 

And here we faced the main choice of all the time. To be free or not to be. But freedom has complex meaning. If you want to be free of excessive movements, than you'd better to take tiling. Or you can be free in your movements, than you'd better to take stacked style. It's your choice but if you get tiling, you will find out how deep rabbit-hole goes. :)