Tiling Window Manager

I've been looking into tiling window managers because I'm tired of manually positioning and resizing all my windows whenever I want to see some information side by side. However, the tiling window managers I've investigated so far seem rather minimalist and seem mainly for rearranging terminal windows with clumsy keyboard navigation.

I'm more or less looking for a way to partition my screen and maximize a program on each partition. Bonus points if it works on Gnome.

Solution 1:

This might be entirely off topic, so feel free to mod me down if MS Windows solutions is not what you want (the post does not explicitly say only Linux solutions). I wrote MaxTo, which partitions your screen into rectangles and changes all maximize events to put windows into those partitions. You can find it at maxto.net.

Solution 2:

Awesome window manager supports tiling as well as floating windows, so you have the choice. The default configuration will give you a minimalist feeling, but Awesome is so configurable that this can be changed. Full use of both mouse and keyboard is supported. Indeed, customizing it to satisfaction may take a long time, but then again at least it is possible to reach satisfaction with it.