To a tiling WM user, apparently other GUIs are like wearing handcuffs

[liam_on_linux]

 This is interesting to me. I am on the other side, and ISTM that the tiling WM folks are the camp you describe.

Windows (2.01) was the 3rd GUI I learned. First was classic MacOS (System 6 and early System 7.0), then Acorn RISC OS on my own home computer, then Windows.

Both MacOS and RISC OS have beautiful, very mouse-centric GUIs where you must use the mouse for most things. Windows was fascinating because it has rich, well-thought-out, rational and consistent keyboard controls, and they work everywhere. In all graphical apps, in the window manager itself, and on the command line.

-- Ctrl + a letter is a discrete action: do this thing now.

-- Alt + a letter opens a menu

-- Shift moves selects in a continuous range: shift+cursors selects text or files in a file manager. Shift+mouse selects multiple icons in a block in a file manager.

-- Ctrl + mouse selects discontinuously: pick disconnected icons.

-- These can be combined: shift-select a block, then press ctrl as well to add some discontinuous entries.

-- Ctrl + cursor keys moves a word at a time (discontinuous cursor movement).

-- Shift + ctrl selects a word at a time.

In the mid-'90s Linux made Unix affordable and I got to know it, and I switched to it early '00s.

But it lacks that overall cohesive keyboard UI. Some desktops implement most of Windows' keyboard UI (Xfce, LXDE, GNOME 2.x), some invent their own (KDE), many don't have one.

The shell and editors don't have any consistency. Each editor has its own set of keyboard controls, and some environments honour some of them -- but not many because the keyboard controls for an editor make little sense in a window manager. What does "insert mode" mean in a file manager?

They are keyboard-driven windowing environments built by people who live in terminals and only know the extremely limited keyboard controls of the most primitive extant shell environment, one that doesn't honour GUI keyboard UI because it predates it and so in which every app invents its own.

Whereas Windows co-evolved with IBM CUA and deeply embeds it.

The result is that all the Linux tiling WMs I've tried annoy me, because they don't respect the existing Windows-based keystrokes for manipulating windows. GNOME >=3 mostly doesn't either: keystrokes for menu manipulation make little sense when you've tried to eliminate menus from your UI.

Even the growing-in-trendiness MiracleWM because the developer doesn't use plain Ubuntu, he uses Kubuntu, and Kubuntu doesn't respect basic Ubuntu keystrokes like Ctrl+Alt+T for a terminal, so neither does MiracleWM.

They are multiple non-overlapping, non-cohesive, non-uniform keyboard UIs designed by and for people who never knew how to use a keyboard-driven whole-OS UI because they didn't know there was one. So they all built their own ones without knowing that there's 30+ years of prior art for this.

All these little half-thought-out attempts to build something that already existed but its creators didn't know about it.

To extend the prisoners-escaping-jail theme:

Each only extends the one prisoner cell that inmate knew before they got out, where the prison cell is an app -- often a text editor but sometimes it's one game.

One environment lets you navigate by only going left or straight. To go right, turn left three times! Simple!

One only lets you navigate in spirals, but you can adjust the size, and toggle clockwise or anticlockwise.

One is like Asteroids: you pivot your cursor and apply thrust.

One uses Doom/Quake-style WASD + mouse, because everyone knows that, right? It's the standard!

One expects you to plug in a joypad controller and use that.