Tiling Window Managers: The Alternative Almost Nobody Considers

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Windows were never meant to overlap. At least that was the original idea.

When people thought in the seventies about how a screen could give space to several things at once, nobody pictured a chaos of overlapping rectangles. They pictured partitions. Surfaces that divide themselves the moment something new joins — like tables on which books lie side by side, not stacked atop one another. The earliest windowing systems on Symbolics Lisp Machines, in the Andrew Project at Carnegie Mellon University, even Microsoft Windows 1.0 in 1985: all tile-based. Overlapping windows counted as an option, not the default.

Tiling Window Manager on libcom.de

Tiling Window Managers: The Alternative Almost Nobody Considers