[lug] Window Tiling Tools for Display Management

[Davide Del Vento]

Thanks for sharing, this is great to know and I may give it a try at home.

FWIW, at work they switched my workstation from Linux to MacOS and I was
appalled by how "poor" (*) it is.

One pet peeve of mine (for both Linux and MacOS) is that it "forgets" my
windows placements when I either shut down the machine or change monitors.
I want it to remember not only "what was I running" (both Linux and MacOS
do OK, they could do better but it's acceptable), but both forget where
each window were, so out of 3 monitor and 4 or 6 virtual desktops (for a
total of 12 or 18 possible things) at each reboot everything appears on the
first monitor of the first virtual desktop. And after each meeting in which
I brought the laptop (without rebooting) the virtual desktop location of
the apps is preserved, but the monitor it's not, so everything remains on
the laptop screen despite the external monitors are reattached. PITA.

Does gTile automatically improve this? I get that it manually improves it
because I can do what you describe, but I do not want to cycle among my
several terminal windows, multiple browsers, VMs and everything else: I
want them to just go where they were before immediately and automatically.

Cheers,
Davide

(*): I do not intend to start a flame, I just expected MacOS GUI to be
unarguably better than Linux instead it's not

On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 1:02 AM Maxwell Spangler <lists at maxwellspangler.com>
wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> I just found a pretty cool Gnome shell extension and I thought I'd share
> (and endorse) for those few people actually using Linux on workstations
> instead of a MacOS or Windows.
>
> *gTile <https://github.com/gTile/gTile> is a Gnome 3.x shell extension for
> positioning, sizing and tiling of windows. It's similar to / inspired by
> things like divvy <https://mizage.com/divvy/> for MacOS and Windows.*
>
> Here's the short summary of what I can do after customizing it for my very
> precise needs:
>
> 1. Launch an application, say gnome-terminal.
> 2. Put window focus on that app
> 3. Hold keys CTRL + SUPER plus one of the keypad number keys like 7 (top
> left on the key pad)
>
> gTile will resize and reposition that focused window to an initial size
> and position of my choosing. Tap 7 again and it'll cycle through a variety
> of sizes.
>
> Example: Make this window small and position it in the top left. Now make
> it bigger. Now make it wide. Now make it TALL. Good, leave it like that.
> Now move to another window, CTRL + SUPER + 9 and it's in the top right.
>
> For the last six or seven years I've had some custom scripts that would
> launch launch gnome-terminals <https://github.com/maxwax/coding> in
> specific places or reposition windows to specific locations
> <https://github.com/maxwax/position>. But these require X11 graphics and
> as distributions switch to Wayland, key features to reposition and size-set
> windows are unavailable.
>
> I'm really surprised that this type of thing -- tiling -- regardless of OS
> isn't a topic discussed more. As a power user with 30-50 terminal windows
> open (across multiple desktops) on a regular basis, I need these kinds of
> tools to organize my display and I don't want to manually do it with a
> mouse all the time.
>
> I've only been experimenting with gTile for about 2 days, but so far I'm
> really liking it.
>
> Pros:
>
> * Fairly good customization support. It's exceeded my expectations so far.
> * Easy to install and experiment with without any real effort.
> * Works with X11 or Wayland display systems
> * Has a bunch of other features like automatic tiling
> * Even lets you reposition windows using vi cursor keys (h, j, k, l). This
> was a nice surprise. Clever.
>
> Cons:
>
> * Customization is manual, tricky and takes time and experimentation.
> Initial use is very user friendly but a custom config makes it a power user
> tool.
> * Documentation is not clear enough -- took me a little bit to figure out
> what features the docs were describing.
> * Linux is never perfect. I found some problems with gnome-terminal that
> prevent it gTile from doing exactly what I want, but found ways to work
> around it using roxterm as an alternative terminal emulator.
> * Not sure how I'm supposed to access keypad specific features when I'm on
> a laptop with no keypad.
>
> Anyway: Wondering if anyone else is using this, or i3 or divvy for similar
> purposes?
>
> Cheers,
>
> --
>
> Maxwell Spangler
> ===================================================================
> Denver, Colorado, USA
> maxwellspangler.com <http://www.maxwellspangler.com>
> _______________________________________________
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