All three screens went black. Then, one by one, his applications re-opened. But they didn't open normally. Chrome appeared, tiled into a 1x8 horizontal ribbon—a single strip of tabs, eight pixels tall. Spotify tiled itself into a perfect vertical column, showing only the play button. Visual Studio Code opened, but each individual pane inside it—the file explorer, the editor, the terminal—had become its own top-level window, each frantically trying to find a home in the layout.
He was on a Zoom with his boss. He tried to share his screen. "Adrian, why are we looking at a 40-pixel-wide sliver of your PowerPoint?" his boss asked. Adrian had accidentally activated "Chaos Mode." He scrambled, hitting Win+Ctrl+2 to switch to "Writing Mode." The PowerPoint exploded into two vertical columns. The left half showed the title slide. The right half showed the speaker notes , which contained the sentence: " I have not started this report. "
"No problem," he muttered. "Just a bug." tiling windows 11
He leaned back. "This is it," he whispered. "The promised land."
And that is why, to this day, Adrian uses a single, maximized window. One window. One zone. One app at a time. He’s since bought a second monitor just to hold his wallpaper. He doesn't move anything onto it. He just likes the way the light reflects off the empty, untiled, beautifully chaotic void. All three screens went black
He closed the laptop. He called in sick.
He didn't sleep that night. He didn't use a computer for a week. When he finally turned his laptop back on, he held his breath. Windows 11 booted normally. The desktop was clean. No FancyZones. No layouts. He moved a window with his mouse, and it just… floated. Unguided. Free. Chrome appeared, tiled into a 1x8 horizontal ribbon—a
That night, he tried to delete FancyZones. He went into PowerToys settings, un-toggled "Enable Zones," and clicked Uninstall. The dialog box froze. Then, a new window appeared. It wasn't a Windows dialog. It was plain white, with black monospaced text: