My question is essentially if I can fake the behaviour one gets using usual window managers on linux if one has a dual head setup. That is, if I maximize a window it maximizes only on one part of the desktop, matching the area of one physical display. I have only one screen, but it has a fairly large resolution and most of the time I will want to work on multiple separate windows, horizontally tiled.
I have heard about tiling window managers, but all I know are more like corner groups and do not behave like other common window managers (xfwm, compiz). I am currently using xfwm, and would like to stick with it if possible. If this task requries, I'd prefer one which either behaves similar to the common ones out of the box or for which ready configuration is available.
The first hack which came into my mind was trying to fake the information xrandr gives about the screen geometry and fool the window manager using that approach, but this seems like a healy hack which should not be neeccessary.
I'm using fedora linux, but I'm also fine with building the software myself if its not in the package management.
Best Answer
If you can use Compiz, there's this thing called Grid (if I remember the name correctly). I'm not sure if xfwm has something like this, you could check it out.
Also I'd strongly recommend trying out different WM paradigms if they could be more fitting, i.e. don't omit tiling WMs just because they're not common.
If you insist on being able to tile windows without changing your WM, there are separate (3rd-party) utilities to do that. One list is at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager#Third_party_tiling_applications_on_Xorg