Xfce Forum

Mo_B

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2016-03-04

Posts: 42

Advanced tiling in Xfce for big screens

Hello,

I'm using Xfce for more than 10 years now on all machines for uniformity, modern and ancient, strong and weak systems.

Currently my default setup is a 2 or 3 screen setup. Generally Xfce tiling supports half tiling which I already often use. Having 3 screens, I can get 6 vertical tiles.
Going for new bigger screens in the future like popular 21:9 ratios, 38" or up to 50", I would miss this feature.

I guess any more tiling is not supported by Xfce but would require a real tiling window manager. I would not like to switch my desktop environment that I'm used to only for a more advanced tiling. So far I keep my multi-screen setup just for this behaviour which is odd.

Is it wort to file a feature request for such a feature? I'm not sure how other WMs like KDE or Gnome WM are doing it, maybe they all are not supporting any more advanced tiling, I guess even $MS Windows does only support half tiling, does it?

I'm not sure how a more advanced tiling would look like, but as for my terminal emulation I'm a long-time user of the terminator terminal. There it's possible to do multiple generic half tilings of every new tile by shortcut, then it's still possible to resize them or re-equalize to half sized. Something like that would be "awesome" for Xfce.

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Gentoo-Linux

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 10,992

Re: Advanced tiling in Xfce for big screens

There is some work on-going to add window fences to xfwm4. I believe this would help address your requirement.

Also feel free to review the tiling-related requests on the xfwm4 issues board - there are similar requests there that you could post to (as opposed to creating another similar bug/enhancement report).

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zub

Member

Registered: 2023-01-18

Posts: 30

Re: Advanced tiling in Xfce for big screens

You can combine tiling wm with xfce https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xfce#U … ow_manager

There are a few other tiling options that can be used on top of xfce like qtile, xpytile, qtile, cortile etc. I didnt care for any of them personally but they might suit you.

Can also create a custom solution *relatively* simply using xdotool and similar https://eckyputrady.medium.com/using-xd … a360a16c85 I think there are some old forum posts here from projects done by other users.

Iirc a problem with most/all the above (none of which I have stuck with using) is the different kinds of window decorations for gtk2, gtk3, qt etc. Effects of sizing are inconsistent. However the xfce tiling does not seem to have these problems so if more options could be added that would be lovely.

If anyone is working on a new implementation I *implore* them to have a look at the macos-only rectangle https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle It is the absolute best, easy to use, flexible and full featured tiling for stacked window environment. Simple, visual configuration editor is great. Cycling through positions with repeated use of same accelerator is genius. It allows you to have access to many more possibilities than shortcuts assigned/memorized.