Window Tiling

Some good ideas on window tiling have been presented, this page is my attempt to bring a few of these thoughts together, and add my own ideas.

This is the original image of a visual way to tile windows:

Following on from that, I created this sketch of how multiple windows could be linked:

And this one to show how resizing would work once windows are joined:

Update 12-Oct-2009

There has also been this very interesting page posted to the gnome-shell mailing list, of tiling interface for Haiku. One interesting addition is integrating tabs to the window tiling. I think this is a great idea and it's well worth watching the screencast: http://www.freelists.org/post/haiku-development/Two-successful-final-year-projects

Main Features

Windows tiled in this way form a group
Groups move and size as one
A single maximize and minimize button in the top right is used for the entire group
Each window retains its normal menus, but looses its maximize and minimize buttons
A coloured border may be useful to show which windows are grouped
This is not a tiled window manager in the normal sense, in that other windows (and even tiled groups) can be freely sized and moved around the screen.

Finally, I think one of the best places to manage this is in the main Overlay view, and I would like to suggest the addition of control buttons to each workspace:

This adds four extra features to the overlay workspace view:

Normal view: The default view, each workspace has the standard layout and hence is instantly recognisable by the user
Exploded view: Used for finding programs, or dragging programs between workspaces
Tile view: This allows dragging programs and linking them together
Zoom button: Pressing this changes the Overlay View to show just that one workspace alongside the menu

Other usability thoughts

It's possible to hold down Alt to move a window, might it be possible to hold down Ctrl to have a window tile while being dragged? That would let you quickly snap windows together or break them apart at any time.