On window managers and Windows 7

I hate Windows.

There are two major reasons for this. First is the lack of a reasonable text shell like bash. Second is the window manager.

The State of the Art

There are a lot of great features that every window manager on Linux has: edge detection (provide resistance to positioning windows partially off-screen or overlapping other windows), virtual desktops (swap out all your windows for another set of windows), vertical maximize/horizontal maximize, alt-drag, always on top...

Windows XP was early enough that these features were not necessarily compulsory. Windows doesn't need to be a technology leader. Vista should have included them. Windows 7 still doesn't.

Vista/W7 tried to include a couple new features for the window manager. Edge detection? No. Virtual desktops? No. Always on top? No. Alt drag? No.

There's vertical maximize...sort of. If you drag a window to the left or right side of the screen, it's resized to take up that half of the screen.

There are two other notable features in W7's window manager.

Mouse Gestures

Make that mouse gesture. There's only one. If you "shake" a window, all other windows are minimized.

Why? When would you want this? If you only want the one window, why not maximize it? If you had virtual desktops, you could send the window to an empty desktop, or even make a new desktop and send it to that.

Perhaps someone heard about virtual desktops and misunderstood the feature entirely. They ended up with something absolutely useless.

Alt-Tab Outlining

When you're waiting in the alt-tab menu, the window you're currently waiting on will be outlined. For example, if you have Firefox maximized, and a terminal in the background in the upper left and another in the lower right, you can cycle through the alt-tab menu, and it'll show the outline of the upper left terminal when you've selected it, and the same with the lower right.

Windows 7 takes this to the logical extreme. When alt-tabbing, all windows are rendered as outlines. (Well, shadows, actually. Which is effectively the same, just harder to see.) If you have ten windows open, you have no hope of distinguishing between them, except the 1/16 scale pictures of the window that the menu provides.

It's The Team, Stupid

If anyone working on these features had sat back and thought about them even briefly, they would have realized that their implementations were worse than useless. This is a case of keeping up with the Joneses without knowing what the Joneses are doing.

Microsoft stole these features, but when you're stealing a feature, you can at least get it vaguely right. With Microsoft's resources, they should be able to surpass the features they stole. This can only be a result of gross incompetence.