When windows are tiled, each window continues to have the usual resizable borders; if you shrink one, the other stays untouched. But if edges and corners of windows can be snapped to each other, why can’t two such snapped edges be moved at once? The border that is shared between two windows should behave more like the “split” view you get in applications that let you view two parts of a single document at once.
Say you select two windows and you move them so they tile the screen horizontally; one is on the left half of the screen and one is on the right half:
.--------------.--------------. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | '--------------'--------------'
Normally, the border in the middle, where the two windows meet (and have snapped to each other), consists of two independent resize handles that happen to be touching each other. If you want to make one window smaller and the other larger, it takes two operations. What should happen is that the borders should “fuse”, forming a split handle between them.
The individual window resize borders would still be present, with differentiation by the cursor changing when you hover over each, as is normally done to find the resize handles. So as you move the cursor from left to right, it starts as a regular arrow, changes to a resize cursor for the left window, then a split cursor for both windows, then a resize cursor for the right window, and then back to a regular arrow inside the right window.
Closeup of joint border between two windows (a few pixels wide):
Inside | Resize | Resize | Resize | Inside
left | right-hand | both | left-hand | right
window | border of | windows | border of | window
| L window | at once | R window |
If you move the split line to the left, the left window shrinks while the right window grows, so they are always using up the entire screen.
.---------.-------------------. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | '---------'-------------------'
This could also work for corners, letting you drag both windows’ corners at once:
--+--
|
---------._,--------
| |
| |
| |
In fact, such a split line could form any time two windows have adjacent (snapped) edges, even if they’re not filling up the entire screen. This:
.-------------------. .---------. | | | | | | | | | | | '-------------------' '---------'
could be changed to this:
.--------------. .--------------. | | | | | | | | | | | '--------------' '--------------'
with one click and drag.