What is a tiling window manager?

Most desktops are floating: windows can go anywhere and overlap. A tiling window manager does the opposite. It arranges every window itself, edge to edge, so none overlap.

The main styles

• Manual tiling: you choose where each new window splits the screen (i3 and sway work this way).
• Automatic layouts: a rule places windows, such as one main window and a stack beside it (dwm, Amethyst).
• Binary splitting: each new window halves the space of the current one (bspwm, yabai, komorebi by default).
• Scrolling: windows sit in columns on a strip wider than the screen, so nothing shrinks (niri, PaperWM, ClutterFreeMac).

Why people use it

• Nothing is ever hidden behind something else.
• Everything is reachable from the keyboard.
• No time spent dragging windows into place.

The catch with classic tiling

One screen has to hold every window, so each new one makes the others smaller. On a laptop that gets cramped by the fifth window. Scrolling tiling keeps the no overlap rule but lets the row grow past the screen. More in scrolling vs tiling.