Tiling window managers
This is a huge chapter, so I'll just start with a F.A.Q, and maybe follow up with another post later.
What is a window manager?
A window manager is a program that manages all your windows, and sometimes your desktop, your status bar and maybe some other things.
Its main purpose it to let you interact with all the windows you see on your screen, like resize them, move them around, re-arrange them, maximize, minimize, close etc. It also adds a title bar on top, with the window title and the close/minimize/maximize buttons. More buffed-up window managers may offer transparency, animation etc.
Most of the time, you won't know it even exists, and that's because every Operating System or Desktop Environment will have them pre-installed and well integrated.
What's a tiling window manager?
The window managers most people are used to, are stacking or floating window managers. To justify their names, you can think that visible windows can be stacked one on top of an other, or that windows are floating on the screen.
The philosophy behind tiling window managers is that every window that is not 100% visible, is a useless window. That is, a window partially hidden under another window just takes up screen estate. And if you work with more that 1 or 2 windows at the same time, you may need that estate.
So, what they do is they keep all windows fully visible at all times, next to each other. They also provide shortcuts to let you move between them very fast (say goodbye to alt-tab-tab-tab).
How can I try one?
For non-linux users: Although you can install some programs that act on top of your window manager, and can offer you a tiling experience, I'll just stick to Linux/Unix window managers, and how they can be used to completely replace you Desktop Environment (Gnome, KDE etc).
If you're using a Desktop Environment (DE) like Gnome, KDE, xfce etc, you can just install a window manager (WM) with your package manager, log out, and log in again selecting your WM from the log in screen. You may find yourself completely lost, but with a little reading and configuration you can be productive within a few hours, and (in my experience) more productive than before within a few days.
What do I need to know before I give it a try?
A tiling WM, in most cases, will completely replace you desktop environment. That means that you'll not get a desktop background, icons, start menu, settings panel, taskbar and much more.
For some of them you'll have to install extra packages, which is not necessary a bad thing, since the amount of options and customization you can get is extraordinary. For others, like the desktop icons, you'll find that they don't make sense with a tiling WM.
What are my options?
There is a very wide variety of tiling WMs for linux. I'll try to list the most popular ones, along with a small description.
- i3wm: One of the most famous tiling WMs out there. It's very simple, very easy to use, with great documentation, and almost everything you'll ever need. This is the fist tiling WM I tried, and I stuck with it for more that a year. Highly recommended!
- AwesomeWM: AwesomeWM has many more features
- bspwm: bspwm represents all windows as the leaves of a full binary tree. It uses external programs for keybinding and configuration, which makes it very versatile.
- dwm: Brought to you by the suckless team, it's so fast and lightweight you will have a hard time believing it.