GNOME Developers Working To Rethink Their Window Management Approach

GNOME 46 or later will likely be seeing work to overhaul the default window management behavior of the desktop.

GNOME developer Tobias Bernard wrote a lengthy blog post yesterday detailing work being done by the GNOME design team to reimagine their window management behavior with this desktop. Ultimately they are working toward a reimagined approach that will be good enough to be the default behavior rather than opt-in. Some of the key details include:

- Automatically do what people probably want, allow adjusting if needed
- Make use of workspaces as a fully integrated part of the workflow
- Richer metadata from apps to allow for better integration

Our current concept imagines windows having three potential layout states:

- Mosaic, a new window management mode which combines the best parts of tiling and floating
- Edge Tiling, i.e. windows splitting the screen edge-to-edge
- Floating, the classic stacked windows model

This new mosaic mode would be the default behavior and is further detailed in the blog post.

GNOME developers are working to visualize their new window management experience.

This is a major effort and will involve having more window metadata and likely conducting more user research in some areas. The effort is in its early stages and "definitely 46+ material and likely to take multiple cycles."

More details on this GNOME window management work via this blog post.