Squib of the day: Tiling horizontally and vertically

Blue Butterfly on TileIn GNOME bug 85523, the idea is raised of having an operation to tile all windows horizontally or vertically.  (This may be similar to a feature found in some versions of Windows.)

The original idea was to put the option on the window menu, which Havoc vetoed because the window menu is already rather full, and because this is an operation over the desktop as a whole rather than on one window.

It was further suggested that this could become a keybinding, or an option on the menu the user sees when they right-click on the desktop (which would make it not a Metacity issue).

Since this could easily be fixed with a script, your chronicler would have no qualms against closing it with WONTFIX.  However, if it should really be something Nautilus does, then this is a Nautilus problem and not a Metacity one.

Photo © Chris Campbell, cc-by-nc.

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Thomas Thurman

Mostly themes, triaging, and patch review.

6 thoughts on “Squib of the day: Tiling horizontally and vertically”

  1. It’s hard to see how the layout of application windows would be a responsibility of the file manager. I can’t think of a good way way to do the UI, but surely it’s still a window management issue?

  2. Indeed. It is a Window Management function. Hence the job of the Window Manager.
    Closing it because you can’t think of a how to add it to the UI isn’t useful.

    As for the Window menu being cluttered, that’s another issue that should be looked at.

    Always On Top
    Always on Visible Workspace
    Only on this Workspace
    Move to Workspace Right
    Move to Another Workspace

    How often do the majority of users ever use these? Not very, I’d wager.

  3. I concur. I don’t even think that putting this in the desktop’s right click menu makes sense: if your screen is cluttered enough for you to want to tile things, then you probably can’t see the desktop.

  4. I think that tiling horizontally and vertically the windows is more important now than 2 or 3 years ago — There are too many widescreens going around out there, and there are more people that wants to read a document in one side of the screens, while is reading-editing-writing in the other side of the screen in his OOo document (or LaTeX doc, ok ;) ).

    There are plenty of WM that already do this, so, we always have the choice to change WM from Metacity to something like Awesome o Xmonad… but I think that we (all) have to get real: Regular users (like the ones of Gnome – and then of Metacity) don’t want to crack their heads changing WM, possibly causing their desktops to broke, or even worst, to being attack by a velociraptor (haha, taken from xkcd). Just remember that Metacity is the BFF Gnome WM because its easy to use for someone who doesn’t know too much about computers, and possibly are making the change to linux from a Windows machine.

    Well, I hope that no one has been offended with my opinions. I’m just trying to help with thoughts and ideas for the future.

    By the way, thanks a lot for the wonderful software that you people has been building through this years.

    Greeting from Chile! (that’s why my english sucks)

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