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.