Window tiling will set you free (opens in new tab)

hjkl.bearblog.dev·11w·Open original (opens in new tab)
  • 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.

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