• 23 Jan, 2026 *

Let me free you

Window tiling.. repeat after me WINdow tiling. I’m a strong proponent of window tiling for advanced users. I wouldn’t recommend it to my mum, but to anyone even slightly technical it should be a no brainer. Why? Because just like discipline, it sets you free.

Unsettling chaos

Why would you live in a world of chaos and entropy, where the state and position of windows is unknown, where you need to spend your brain power to locate and focus the window which you need? Such a simple action, which shouldn’t take any effort at all. The amount of such actions and loss of time might seem minuscule on a per case basis, but throughout the day and week it compounds. I keep seeing my work colleagues stacking windows one above the other, only to shuffle through them for an eternity to get to that one program that they need. That alone is quite terrible, but if you take into account the amount of effort needed to even set up the clickable corners, window positions, sizes and such, all of which they are mostly doing by CLICKing, it does amount to a quite sad computer usage.

Why would you live in chaos when you could for instance always know where a certain window is, how to get there in a single keystroke, how to move the window to another place with another keybind etc. The solution is pretty simple, tiling window managers.

Tiling WINdow managers

Tiling window managers do all of the above. They offer virtual spaces which you can use however you like, and you can utilize however many you wish. Furthermore, they do the TILING for you. Opening a single application will result in that application being full screen. If you open another application on the same space, it will halve the screen in two and you will have two application side by side. If you open another, it will split it into three, but you can easily break one side into two so you have one larger window taking up half of your screen, and two windows breaking the other half vertically and so on. That behavior alone should be enough to attract people, but if you take a minute to set it all up properly and think about distinct spaces and what their permanent usage will be, this becomes second nature which causes navigation and switching to really come together and become negligible because you always know where a certain window is and how to get to it as fast as possible.

Spaces

Virtual spaces, the component which will make you throw away your second, third or even widescreen monitor away. At least it has done so for me. Since a wee lad I had used a two monitor setup, even three at one point in time but throughout the course of ages and my increasing wisdom I found that all of that is bullcrap. A single window, a single focus is what our brain requires in order to best approach the task in front of it. No Slack, email, Spotify on the side.. all those things take away from your focus and bounce your brain through various thought processes which moves you away from the task at hand. As such, a single space for a single application which is required in the moment is the best way to approach work.

Two apps example

Three apps example

Throughout the years of using tiling window managers, I have a default setup which I use in order to set my system up.

Numbered spaces:

1. Browser
2. Terminal (nvim, notes, device backups etc.)
3. Space for temporary stuff
4. Socials and messaging
5. E-mail client
6. Media (if active)

Lettered spaces:

m. Secondary browser t. Teams (and other app for calls or meetings) p. Password manager (utilising it fairly often due to numerous accounts and logins which I need for my work) a. Cisco ASDM - people using it will know why it has it’s own space

As such, at all times I know where every single application is and how to get there. That really feels great once it gets under your fingers since it becomes like second nature. No overlapping applications, searching where each of them is, only a single glorious keystroke to reach into the portal and spawn where you need to be.

But can you make it better?

Most of the tiling window managers will have extra features which will improve upon the above. What I am referring to is binding certain application to certain spaces which will tile them automatically where they need to be. For example if I boot my laptop and open Safari (yes yes, i know), it will set itself up in space 1, if I open Slack it will be open in space 4 etc. If that sounds cool, I can improve upon that still. I have a keybind which opens Slack, and when it opens it automatically sends it to space 4. However, if the window is already open, that same keybind will take me to the application. This perfects the setup even further, since the most used apps now have their own keybinds. It is an overkill since you can use space shortcuts, but they are interchangeable.

Bound workspaces example

[[on-window-detected]]
if.app-name-regex-substring = 'safari'
run = 'move-node-to-workspace 1'

[[on-window-detected]]
if.app-name-regex-substring = 'ghostty'
run = 'move-node-to-workspace 2'

App keybinds example

alt-shift-cmd-ctrl-s = 'exec-and-forget open -a "Safari.app"'
alt-shift-cmd-ctrl-enter = 'exec-and-forget open -a "Ghostty.app"'

Recommendations

The first window tiling manager I will always recommend is i3wm. That is the one that I grew up on, and the one I used for quite a few years. It is minimal, fast, without nonsense animations and will do all that you need. However, since I moved to MacOS a few years back I had to find an alternative, and I did so with Aerospace. Aerospace is a project which is trying to bring that i3 feel to MacOS. I would say that it is not quite there yet, but it does feel pretty familiar if you have used i3 previously.

Some honorable mentions:

• Yabai (MacOS)
• Hyprland (Linux)

On the shortness of chaos

Window tiling will be one of the most productive improvements you can make for your computer usage. I’m not saying it will not feel weird or hard a bit at the start, but all good things are hard and you will need to practice a bit to get the fruits of labor. However, once the tiling is under your fingers, you will see how blazingly fast you can move between windows to get to where you need to be, and you will notice the improved attention you have when focusing on a single window and a single task. mic drop

PS. Also, no other way of using a computer will feel right ever again.. so it is a curse of sorts too!