When you have 20 or more windows open across nine virtual desktops, the complexity of window management can become overwhelming. A number of new tools are now available to facilitate effective window management. Elsewhere, you can tile your desktop windows in full screen no-gap layouts to simplify copy and paste, drag and drop, and visual comparisons. WindowSizer’s window management engine will automatically resize neighboring windows to maintain a tiled layout.
Innovations in window management; WindowSizer 1.5 Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I could just use a file system browser that supports FTP and SMB and many other protocols and includes split window support.
Just use Konqueror. It has everything you need.
What’s the difference between this application (which costs money), and right clicking on the taskbar in XP and choosing “Tile Windows Vertically/Horisontally”? I think that feature has been in Windows since 3.x
“What’s the difference between this application (which costs money), and right clicking on the taskbar in XP and choosing “Tile Windows Vertically/Horisontally”?”
Try to enlarge one of the windows in XP after tiling. It will partially cover other windows. In Windowsizer, other windows will be automatically resized.
But is that little feature worth $20 for most people?
for some, yes!!!
Not to sound stupid, but how about you just don’t open 20 Windows at once? Sure, you might be able to think of 20 vaguely related applications you have to use at the same time but the general case is using between 1 and 4 applications I think. People that are trying to deal with 10 virtual desktop with 40 windows open need to organise themselves better in my opinion. You’d laugh at somebody if they tried to use a TV remote, a mobile phone, a hammer, an oven etc. all at the same time and it’s quite similar.
I find one of the best ways to deal with this is multiple monitors in my opinion as it means less time messing about with which windows as taking up the screen because you have more room. Using one monitor would be similar to using a tiny office desk and trying to lay out all the pieces of paper you want to read on it. If you have a bigger desk, you can lay them all out and see them all at once and don’t shuffle them around all the time.
just use ION ( http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/ ). it is ugly as hell but surely the most useable “desktop experience(tm)”.
I’m a little confused as to why this is labelled as “innovation” in window management; tiling WMs have been around for quite some time now (ion, larswm, and suchlike). The only new thing here is that it’s for windows and costs money.
Frankly, it’s getting a little old seeing advertisements for a commercial product being posted as “news”.
Completely agree. Ion2 is the reason why i left gnome and windowMaker. I haven’t found anything that allows me to be so productive.
There’s also WMI, which support both traditional floating windows (ion2 supports it, but it’s very basic support), and tileable windows. But currently WMI is being rewriten from scratch in C (i think that because of performance reasons… of course in anoter league compared to gnome/kde/etc…).
Maybe you don’t need it. Others might.
Let’s see:
* gaim – 2 windows
* mozilla thunderbird – 1
* mozilla firefox – 3 (I like to have separate windows for separate “topics”)
* vnc window with work – 1
* xterms – 5 at the moment
* xmms – 2 windows
* openoffice – 1
* gvim – 1
sum = 2+1+3+1+5+2+1+1+1 = 16 windows. over 6 desktops.
I could shave away maybe 3-4 of them, depending on what I’m doing right now.
Luckily, pekwm supports grouping of multiple windows into one frame.
Geoshell (GPL) for Windows has many of these features. Use it everyday…
Innovation? Bah. Windows had this in version 1.0
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/WinHistoryDesktop.mspx
😉
http://www.brianapps.net/sizer.html
For windows, not as fancy as windowsizer, but after some configuring it is very useful. And free…
Gee, this seems a lot like Expose, which is built-in to Mac OS X. Guess that you have to buy a lot of extra stuff when using windows to equal a Mac.