One important missing piece is having information on the maximum desired size of a window. This is the size beyond which the window content stops looking good. Not having this information is one of the reasons that traditional tiling window managers have issues, especially on larger screens.

I have been upset over losing this functionality from the classic Macintosh days for decades now. This was built into the Macintosh OS going back to at least System 7. Clicking the “expand” button in the title bar would expand (or shrink) a window to its optimum size. For Finder windows, that meant the smallest size that could display all the files without scrolling (if possible).

Developers had to implement logic to make it work. For the most part, they did, and it worked very well up through OS 9.

Then came OS X. The green button, at first, worked exactly the same way it did in OS 9. The problem was that even Apple didn’t give a damn to write any logic for it into their apps. It might as well have been a “randomize” button. Users got frustrated. Windows converts wondered why there was no “maximize” button and blamed the very concept of expanding rather than Apple’s now-piss-poor implementation. Longtime Mac users wondered why we effectively lost a very useful feature.

Over the years, Apple continued to neglect the function of the green button, and third-party devs largely followed suit. Eventually Apple changed the default behavior of the green button to go into full-screen mode, hiding the original (still mostly broken) “zoom” functionality behind an Option-click. At this point, the the difference is effectively “full screen” vs “windowed full screen”. RIP the classic Mac OS expand function.

I love the direction this is going, I’ve been using i3/sway for years and gnome apps recently became awesome in tiling mode because of their responsiveness. If this is implemented this could definitely get me back on gnome 👍

When I was using Gnome on a laptop, I really enjoyed the PaperWM tiling manager extension. It’s not exactly something that can be used with a mouse, but it’s a really pleasant touchpad/touch first multitasking interface, where instead of having traditional workspaces that are constrained to the size of your monitor, you basically get infinite horizontally scrollable workspaces that are a joy to navigate with a touchpad.

Are they going to rethink putting thumbnails in the file selection dialog or many of their other insane decisions?

Gnome seems like they want to take the Apple approach to UI design without the attention to detail that Apple’s UX has.

I’ve been using paperwm on gnome for a couple years now, it’s my preferred paradigm for tiling. This looks like it has a lot of the same influences, so I’m interested in seeing where it goes

Moving maximized windows to their own workspace seems like a really cool idea. Workspace management is one of the things I struggle with so I usually just end up with way too many tiled windows on a single screen when they could be moved around more efficiently.

Looks really interesting, hopefully this can be a step forward for window management as a whole