Compiz vs Aero Snap, Round 2, Fight!

Now that we've seen tiling is nothing new to any operating system, let's take a look at how it's implemented.

Windows 7 gives you some good options to manage tiling. The default is the Aero Snap, which let's you manage two windows by dragging them to the screen edges. The limit to this is that it only allows you to manage two Windows at a time. What happens if you want to tile three or more windows?

You can always just snap additonal windows, and leave them stacked on top of each other. It hides the Windows in the background, but it is a simple matter to alt+tab to bring the window you want to the foreground.

Microsoft left in most of the tiling manager from XP. If you right click on the dock (I mean taskbar) you can tile and cascade all open windows. It gives you the option of tiling them vertically (windows are side by side) or horizontally (stacked on top of each other.) Microsoft, for whatever reason, left out the grid option. (With three or more windows this option displays windows in a pre-arranged grid.)

If you want to tile specific windows, you have to resort to manually grabbing them and using Aero snap, or opening the task manager and ctrl+clicking the applications you want to tile.

Here's a video:



Ubuntu with Compiz gives us three different tiling options. The default is the grid plugin.

The grid divides the screen into 8 regions. By default it uses the numeric keypad to manage windows along that grid. You place the foreground window in a corresponsing location by hitting ctl+alt+ numpad key. For instance, if I want a screen to tile horizontally across the top of the screen, I hit ctrl+alt+num8. The window takes up the top half of the screen. If I select another window and hit ctrl+alt+num2 it will tile across the bottom half of the screen. 4 and 6 do the same for left and right. 7, 9, 1, and 3 will reduce the windows to squares and place them in the corresponding corners.

An added feature to grid is that each area has three levels of tiling. Re-entering the hotkey sequence toggles through resizing the window to occupy 1/3, 1/2, and 2/3 of the screen.

Here's an explanation of how to bind it to the mouse:



Here's a video of the main function, the explanation starts at 1:43:



The next option for tiling is the Maximumize plugin. This plugin is a bit more fluid than grid. It allows you to control which direction a window expands or contracts in. By default windows are controlled through hot keys. The primary hotkey is super+m. It will cause the selected window to expand in all directions until it encounters another window or fills the screen. There are options to expand only vertically, only horizontally, only up, only down, only left, and only right. There are corresponding minimizing options as well.

Here's a video:


The final option is the the tiling plugin. It maps traditional tiling to hotkeys, and will tile all open windows simultaneously. It has hotkeys for using the grid, tiling vertically, tiling horizontally, and cascading windows.

Here's a video:

Hi. I'm *nix, and Windows 7 was my idea.

There's an old saying that the eyes are the windows of the soul. In this case, the windowing manager is the window of the OS's soul. After gazing longingly into the eyes of Unix and Linux's window managers, Microsoft has incorporated some fun eye-candy into it's latest operating system.

First up is the Aero Snap effect. This is Microsoft's implementation of tiling for Windows 7. Tiling is nothing new. It's merely resizing windows so that they can be displayed side by side, either vertically or horizontally. It is also possible to cascade windows, so that they are neatly stacked one ontop of another. Old school users will remember that PARC's Star (the GUI copied by Apple, which was copied by Microsoft) was the first tiling window manager. That was in 1980.

What Microsoft does is apply a little flair to the tiling.

Here's Microsoft's commercial:



And here's another demo:



You'll notice that the Windows have a slight 3d effect to them, and there's a nice transparency effect. The interface has been simplified a bit. It has been combined with keyboard shortcuts (windows key + left/right/up), as well as the use of screen edges. (More on screen edges later.) All in all, it's a nice update to an old feature. These features were in beta in 2008.

Now let's take a look at what Linux was doing in 2005 and 2006:



This video is from May of 2006. The user is showing off several Compiz features, including tiling and scaling.





Here's a more specific example. Seems a little familiar? Here, the user is demonstrating tiling in the Beryl compositing window manager. Beryl is a fork (an off-shoot) of the Compiz project started by Novell back in 2004. They released Compiz as an open-source project back in January 2006. Novell's spin on tiling included some transparency, some very nice 3D effects, customizable keyboard shortcuts, you get the picture.