Xfce Forum

jemadux

Member

From: Greece

Registered: 2012-09-13

Posts: 13

xfwm as tilling wm

Hello .. I am love tilling wm .

I don't want switch for my own reasons to i3 or something like that ... can you just provide how i can do xfwm as tilling wm ?

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Dev1 | openrc | XFCE
Greetings from Greece

zub

Member

Registered: 2023-01-18

Posts: 35

Re: xfwm as tilling wm

Have you seen the Window Manager keyboard settings? You can natively assign keyboard shortcuts to tile a window to any half or quarter of the screen as well as horizontal/vertical fill, maximize, minimize etc. It is simple but maybe it is enough for you. It is what I use.

On the other end, if you want to be more sophisticated, you could try replacing xfwm but still using the rest of xfce. I haven't actually done this, but the Arch WIki has instruction on how to use a different window manager with xfce. So you replace the xfwm4 component with i3 or awesome or whatever you should please.

In terms of middle ground where you don't fully replace xfwm, there are some scripts/applications that are more advanced that the native xfwm. Here is some links from my bookmarks. I tried most of these over the past 1-3 years and didn't find any of them to be what I was looking for but plenty of people like them. Tho I see some of them have been recently updated so I might check back in on them.
* xpytile: Automatic / dynamic window tiling for XFCE
* New Script: Tile, Cascade, Expose' Windows, etc / General discussion / Xfce Forums
* Xlap
* shinglify
* Using xdotool as a Tiling Window Solution
* ssokolow/quicktile: Adds window-tiling hotkeys to any X11 desktop
* Qtile
* leukipp/cortile: Linux auto tiling manager with hot corner support
* Improved Tiling Control in a Stacking Window Environment
* dfyockey/demitile: Point & Keypress Tiling for X11-based Desktop Environments
* jakebian/snaptile: Versatile window tiling for X11 with powerful keyboard controls

(In no particular order.)

If you are still not sure on your solution, maybe try providing more details about what functionality it is you are more looking for and even a bit about why you don't just go for a straight tiling WM.

eriefisher

Member

From: ON, Canada

Registered: 2008-10-25

Posts: 528

Re: xfwm as tilling wm

Go to Settings>>Window Manager>>Keyboard

Scroll down to find the tiling settings and add your shortcuts.

Here is a set up I found a while back.
https://uli.rocks/p/tilling-xfce/

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Siduction
Debian Sid
Xfce 4.18

zub

Member

Registered: 2023-01-18

Posts: 35

Re: xfwm as tilling wm

Just wanted to add that after I made the above comment a couple weeks ago, I took another look at some of the links I posted. And it was worth the time because  quicktile has been a great addition to xfce! I guess in the past I had bookmarked it but never really tried it out for some reason.

It adds a bit of useful functionality compared to the built-in window management as described by eriefisher. For example more variations on window tiling to allow cycling through different permutations of a given command. Such as tile to the right:

But according to issue #136 in the quicktile repo, there are some benefits to using the xfwm native tiling that can't/won't be available to quicktile. I am currently using a mix of both to do different things but the keyboard shortcuts are a bit of a mess so eventually I'll have to fix that.

Don't know if it's any help to OP because I don't know what their requirements are. But to me this is the first replacement/extension to the existing xfwm capabilities that is really easy to integrate into my existing habits. So I wanted to recommend quicktile to anyone searching for a bit more juice, while not going fully tiled.

mint4all

Member

From: off the map

Registered: 2018-08-21

Posts: 276

Re: xfwm as tilling wm

Greetings!

If you have not yet decided on a particular add-on, perhaps it would be worth to take a look at https://www.giuspen.net/x-tile/ ... As I understand it, it won't make such a mess with your keyboard's tiling-key mappings (can't verify this myself as I don't you use it / have no need for window tiling). And has a lot of tiling layout options, and a gui to configure it, too.

Cheers, m4a

Last edited by mint4all (2023-12-11 01:44:58)

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