Today, the second version of i3 has been released. It supports floating windows now, which is convenient for many popups, toolbar windows, etc. i3 aims to be an improved tiling window manager, mainly inspired by wmii. Similarily to other tiling window managers, the goal is to increase productivity by not having overlapping windows. In contrast to wmii, i3 was designed to work well with Xinerama and particular attention has been given to producing clean, readable, and hackable code. See the website for goals, downloads and documentation or go directly to the userguide for a quick introduction.
As opposed to adding tiling as an option to existing window managers? I get why tiling can be a good idea at times, but I don’t see why you need a special window manager to handle it.
So far it is more likely that tiling wm will have floating windows, such as “awesome” and others.
KDE may have basic tileing feature someday, but most of the best feature of tiling windows manager such as advanced virtual desktop are out of the scope of KWin, Emerald and Metacity. They are better in there own WM, so that they can push some feature irrelevant for floating based WM.
I find it surprising that there are many ‘dynamic’ tiling windowmanagers out there (i3, wmii, ratpoison, xmonad, larswm, dwm, probably missed some).
Personally, I love the ‘static’ tiling+tabbing approach as found in Ion: tiles do not resize or move around on their own, only if I want them to (there are keybindings for splitting/merging tiles).
One thing I miss is a good ‘birds-eye’ view of all the open windows – some kind of ‘expose’ for tabs would be awesome.
It strikes me as odd that so few window managers choose that route.
AwesomwWM hate that feature
If you mostly need tiled windows for terminal sessions (doesn’t everyone?), you can avoid changing the whole window manager by trying out terminator (apt-gettable):
http://www.tenshu.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/terminator.png