xoat

X Obstinate Asymmetric Tiler

• Designed for wide screens, including multi-head support.
• Static tiling; you get just three fixed tiles and windows never move 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.

The Layout

--------------------------------
|                    |         |
|                    |         |
|                    |    2    |
|          1         |         |
|                    |---------|
|                    |         |
|                    |    3    |
--------------------------------

Philosophy

• 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:
    1. Large work-being-done apps
    2. Medium monitoring-something apps
    3. Small background-chat-music apps
    4. Apps people should not use ;-)
• 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.

Stuff Removed

Some elements that proved to be the wrong direction for xoat have been removed.

• Tags have been replaced with the snapshot/rollback mechanism.
  • Tags were a way to group and raise windows en-masse, but they were fiddly to use.
  • Snapshot allows the freedom to mess windows up then quicky revert to a known state.
• Some EWMH desktop atoms have been dumped as surplus to requirements.