Hey guys, I’ve been running Mint on my home computer for a little while now and I’m having a great time, however there’s one behaviour from Windows I’m missing. When you hit win + arrows to snap the currently focussed window to the left or right half of the screen, windows will present a dialogue to select a companion window for the other half of the screen from your other floating windows. Does anyone know how best to implement something like this? I tried a tiling WM like i3, but that’s a bit more… involved than what I’m looking for. Thanks!
If you use the default cinnamon desktop on linux mint, theres an extension for it called gTile.
https://github.com/shuairan/gTile
Not sure if it does what you want.
TBH I’ve always found the popup showing all the other windows when tiling in Windows to be annoying so I’ve never looked for it on Linux.
I’ve got this now, looks pretty cool, thanks! Gonna keep looking over the documentation, but I can’t quite see the particular behaviour I’m looking for. It has the snapping (and better options than Win10), but I want to be presented with the list of other available windows for snapping on the other side.
It doesn’t target Gnome, it targets Cinnamon - and I don’t think they share the same API.
OP runs Cinnamon. But if you’re on Gnome, this one does:
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/3733/tiling-assistant/
Idk maybe this? Tiling wm plugin for gnome shell (which is the UI) https://gitlab.com/lundal/tactile
They are on Cinnamon so something like gTile or another native Cinnamon tiling extension would be best
Probably not what you’re looking for but this behavior works very well on KDE Plasma.
I’m not tied to anything at this stage, but I don’t have a lot of free time for trying different stuff. Can I install this DE alongside cinnamon, like I have with i3?
Kind of… The problem with full DEs like GNOME and KDE is that they pull in a lot of dependencies and make a lot of changes. So it can break visuals or change icons in each others environments or install apps with duplicate functions. Something like i3 has a lot less clutter because it expects the user to build their own environment.
The best way to try out KDE would be to install it under a new user on your system so it doesn’t conflict with your original home directory. Or you could boot up a live image of Kubuntu or some other KDE flavored Linux distro and mess around with it a bit to see if you want to commit to it.
While you can install KDE on mint without issues (apt install kde-plasma-desktop) I would recommend installing a KDE focused distro because sometimes they have better default configs.
But Plasma should be able to do win + arrow keys out of the box and current versions of Plasma should have basic tiling functions by dragging a window around and holding shift. If there’s anything you don’t like it’s a very configurable platform.
You should try out KDE in a Live CD. The snapping and tiling features work very well, Windows needs to catch up
Don’t recommend a totally separate DE for something trivial
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If i3 was a bit too involved for you but you generally like the idea of a tiling window manager you might prefer AwesomeWM.
I believe there is a setting under the windows settings. If not you should be able to set a custom shortcut
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