Stage 9 — Floating Windows

What it is. The first stage of the daily-driver era: windows that shouldn’t tile, don’t. File pickers, “Save as…” dialogs, and fixed-size utility windows get force-tiled today like any other toplevel — the single most disruptive behavior in day-to-day use of a pure tiler.

Deliverable (from KICKOFF.md): a file picker opens floating and centered instead of being tiled.

The intended shape: xdg-shell already marks dialog-like toplevels (a set parent, or min/max size hints pinning the window to a fixed size) — those float automatically, centered over their parent, at their preferred size. Per-app config rules and a manual float toggle can follow once the automatic detection covers the common cases.

Status

Not started — next up. This chapter will be filled in once the work lands, the same way every earlier stage was: after building it, not before.