QuickTile

Keyboard-driven Window Tiling for your existing X11 window manager

Requirements:

Debian and derivatives (Ubuntu, Mint, etc.):

sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pip python3-setuptools python3-gi python3-xlib python3-dbus gir1.2-glib-2.0 gir1.2-gtk-3.0 gir1.2-wnck-3.0

Fedora and derivatives:

sudo dnf install python3 python3-pip python3-setuptools python3-gobject python3-xlib python3-dbus gtk3 libwnck3

For other distros or for more details, please consult the Dependencies section of the manual.

Installation

QuickTile can be run from the source folder without installation via the ./quicktile.sh script.

For system-wide installation, the current option is pip3, which will record a log to allow easy uninstallation.

sudo -H pip3 install https://github.com/ssokolow/quicktile/archive/master.zip

Now that PyGObject is available on PyPI, other options are being explored.

Consult the Installation section of the manual for full details and alternative installation options.

First-Run Instructions for Global Hotkeys:

1. Run quicktile or ./quicktile.sh once to generate your configuration file at ~/.config/quicktile.cfg.
2. Edit the keybindings as desired.
3. Run quicktile --daemonize or ./quicktile.sh --daemonize to bind to global hotkeys.
4. If everything seems to be working, add quicktile --daemonize or /full/path/to/quicktile.sh --daemonize to the list of commands your desktop will run on login.

Consult the Configuration section of the manual for further details.

Important Notes:

• If run in a terminal, QuickTile's --daemonize option will attempt to report any problems with claiming global hotkeys for itself.
• You can get a list of valid actions for the configuration file by running quicktile --show-actions.
• You can list your current keybindings by running quicktile --show-bindings.
• If you experience problems, please consult the FAQ section of the manual before reporting an issue.

Usage (Typical)

1. Focus the window you want to tile
2. Hold the modifiers defined in ModMask (Ctrl+Alt by default).
3. Repeatedly press one of the defined keybindings to cycle through window sizes available at the desired location on the screen.

Consult quicktile --show-bindings or the Command Reference section of the manual for a list of default keybindings.

(For example, under default settings, repeatedly pressing Ctrl+Alt+7 will place the active window in the top-left corner of the screen and cycle it through different width presets.)

This works best when combined with functionality your existing window manager provides (eg. Alt+Tab) to minimize the need to switch your hand between your keyboard and your mouse.

See the Usage section of the manual for alternative ways to interact with QuickTile.

Removal

If you installed QuickTile system-wide using pip3, it can be removed with the following commands:

sudo pip3 uninstall --break-system-packages quicktile
sudo rm /usr/local/bin/quicktile

Without --break-system-packages, it will refuse to remove things installed outside a virtualenv (including things it installed) because it may remove things the system package manager is managing.

See the Removal section of the manual for more details on what a safe use of --break-system-packages looks like and instructions on clearing out files left behind by other installation methods

Contributing

I welcome contributions with one caveat: I have plans to make Flathub into QuickTile's primary distribution channel and they disallow AI-generated or AI-assisted applications.

Also, at the moment, my time for working on hobby projects is very limited so it may take me a while to accept any PR that I can't git pull, review, and QA-test in 15-30 minutes between non-hobby things. (eg. Major architectural changes to implement additional backends. Functionality which I can only QA-test under GNOME, since GNOME runs so badly under Virtualbox on KDE and requires me to pull out and set up a hand-me-down laptop for testing it.)

The recommended approach to make sure minimal effort is wasted is to open an issue indicating your interest in working on something. That way, I can let you know if there are any non-obvious design concerns that might hold up my accepting your pull requests.

If you're looking for something to do, a ready supply of simple TODOs is split across two different mechanisms:

1. Run grep -R TODO *.py quicktile/ in the project root.
2. Set todo_include_todos = True in docs/conf.py and run cd docs; make html to generate a version of the manual with a TODO listing on the top-level API documentation page.

See the Developer's Guide for more information.