First things first. I tried window tiling but I didn't have the impression of a solid implementation like I had with tabbing. For example setting the "column" mode didn't change kwin behaviour which looked to me exactly like "spiral". Also at some point the left half of the screen was empty, while the right half was filling "spiral"-like.

I wonder if someone can confirm this behaviour as it may warrant a bug report.

About tabbing: it seems I can't set kwin so that new windows of an application will be auto-tabbed with all other windows of the same application.

Finally about tiling again, what are the future developments planned for this feature? I for one would like to have the desktop split in user-defined areas (geometry and placement) where I could "drag" windows to tab them with all other windows in the same area, effectively creating a fixed layout with fast access to the windows I need.

re: "About tabbing: it seems I can't set kwin so that new windows of an application will be auto-tabbed with all other windows of the same application"

in systemsettings -> workspace behavior -> window behavior -> advanced -> window tabbing -> automatically group similar windows

Doesn't work reliably on my system :/
At least for kmail if I compose new mail the window won't be tabbed along with the main window.
Skype on the other hand seems to handle this, dolphin works too.
These are the programs I use most often, can't say anything about others.

so your issue with Kmail tabbing is that the compose window (which I would think isn't considered the same app as a Kmail window - not sure if it's considered a spawned app or a child app or ) doesn't automatically tab? I'm not sure it should or that people would want/expect that behavior.

I think you would need to go into "window rules" and set a new rule for the compose window to do what you wish.

I managed to achieve the desired behaviour by setting an application rule and forcing tabbing, foreground tabbing and tabbing by id.

Thanks for the support
Now I'm waiting for some impressions about tiling.

Darknight wrote:I managed to achieve the desired behaviour by setting an application rule and forcing tabbing, foreground tabbing and tabbing by id.

I only had to force tabbing (which for some silly reason is called "grouping" in the Norwegian translation, very confusing) to get what I wanted. I really like tabbing now that I can set it for only Okular.

Firefox and Dolphin handle their own tabs perfectly well, although it would of course be cool if tabbing eventually became such a general and well-worked out feature that application developers could say "either use my own built-in tabbing system or let the window manager handle it", so that a user could have KWin tabs work as if they were built-in Firefox tabs (it would certainly take up less screen estate).

That may or may not be a good idea depending on the extra features that some programs (firefox for one) provide for tabs and their ability to keep them with a unified system that lives outside of the application.

As a small update to the previous post, I excluded dialogs from the auto tabbing as they painfully forced the geometry of all windows.

I think there was a brainstorm idea about this.