t2 - A Manual Tiling Solution for Floating Window Managers

About

t2 was designed to afford some of the perqs of tiling window managers to floating window managers like Mutter, Xfwm, and Marco. It can be used with a tiling window manager on floating-mode workspaces, but that's just silly.

These are the main design principles that guide development of t2:

• To be as friendly as possible to work with, once you understand the proper invocation pattern.
• To keep the command syntax both compact and easy to understand. The simplest invocation takes a single 4- or 6-character argument, and the significance of each character is straightforward.
• To be easily adaptable for a more efficient workflow. Because tiling by script call is ultimately still not a particularly efficient way to place windows, being able to access the script via more efficient tools is ultimately what keeps it viable. The main use case I target is the ability to easily assign tiling configurations to keyboard shortcuts.

For simply placing a single window, this can still get rather clunky, depending on your needs. With a little preconfiguration and a fuzzy-searching menu utility (e.g., dmenu or rofi), you can create a simple, fast, and flexible workflow for window placement. t2 ships with scripts for both of the aforementioned utilities.

Prerequisites

t2 depends on xdotool for placement. To use the tiling menu scripts included, you will need to install either rofi or dmenu.

For keyboard shortcuts, you can use sxhkd or the keyboard shortcut facilities provided by your desktop environment or window manager.

The DE-specific config generators require that environment's configuration utility (xfconf for Xfce, dconf for MATE).

Installing

t2 is written to be easily installable at the user level. Simply copy the script to a directory in your $PATH ($HOME/bin is usually included in $PATH on most distros), and copy the config and cache directories to $HOME.

Configuring

To get started with t2, run t2 -r to auto-generate a layout that respects your desktop environment's monitor configuration (e.g., panel placement). Xfce and MATE desktop environments are currently supported.

If you want gaps between your windows:

• Create $HOME/.config/t2/layouts/, where is the name of your monitor as provided by xrandr:

xrandr --listactivemonitors | tail -n+2 | awk '{gsub(/[+*]/, ""); print $2}'

At a minium, specify atile_gap, e.g.,

tile_gap=32

Run t2 -r after editing to generate a new config with the desired gap setting.

Additional supported variables include top_margin, bottom_margin, left_margin, and right_margin for the respective screen edges. If these variables are not configured, then they will be set to tile_margin. If the tile_margin is not configured, then it (and the screen edge margins) will be set to 0.

Syntax

t2 is called with as a command line consisting of as few as two words.

The script takes one mandatory argument: a 4-character string that defines the placement of the window. The substrings are explained in the code comments that accompany each variable. Below are some examples.

Examples

Say you want to divide your desktop into five equally spaced horizontal tiles. If you have a window that needs a little more space than a single tile, say 3 tiles, and you want it to take up the full vertical space across those tiles, focus the window and call the following:

t2 513f

Keeping the dimensions the same, you can center the window (i.e., using all but the first and tiles) like this:

t2 524f

or place it to the far right like this:

t2 535f

If you want your applications window to occupy only the upper (/higher) half of spaces 1 through 3:

t2 513h

And if you want it to occupy only the lower half of spaces 1 through 3:

t2 513l

So far the only vertical possibilities are [f]ull-tile, [h]igh-tile, and [l]ow-tile placement.

The optional second argument defines the padding tile_gap between windows. The default value is wide but maintains decent readability on large screens.

Say you want to place a browser window on the right side of the screen, taking up just a little more than half your screen space, and with room for a few smaller windows to the left. You also want a tighter margin for readability. The following:

t2 747f 32

places your browser accordingly, and tightens the margin from the default 64 to 32px.

Window Selection

Notice that the window has to be focused/selected in advance in order to place it. Some desktop enviroments' app launchers accept t2 invocations and place the focused window after closing. This has been tested with the launchers shipped with GNOME and MATE.

dmenu and rofi are shown to behave similarly, and they tend to place windows much faster than GTK+-based launchers.

Note that xfce4-appfinder tends to (albeit consistently) place itself before closing. If you're using Xfce and insistent on using a GTK+ app, you might try building a tile cache like the one generated in the shipped menu scripts and piping it to a zenity or yad dialogue for easy placement selection. Note, though, that I have not tested this use case and cannot guarantee better results. (I may work on this in the future, but I have no plans to for now.)

Todo

Some features that will be coming to t2 in the (hopefully near) future:

• Simple user install script - 'cause why not?

• Named presets - set e.g. t2 topleft or t2 browser for preferred/established window placements. (These would come at the cost of syntactic compactness but would lend advantages elsewhere.)

• Preconfigured divs - chop a character off of ${1}!

• Blacklisting via grep-ing window titles. This'll be tricky for windows whose names are subject to change, like browsers, terminals, and file managers.

Thanks

Special thanks to grocid for gtile, on which this project is heavily based.

https://github.com/grocid/gtile