I’ve recently gotten to really like tiling window managers. I started with dwm, which I still use on my old old laptop for performance’s sake. On my fast laptop, I’m currently using wmii. Once in awhile, though, I feel the need to run gnome. I.e. to play with syncing with Ubuntu One. I’ve gotten to hate moving windows around, though. So I looked for a few of the ways to add tiling to metacity. I’ve settled upon stiler, plus a minor patch of my own. I’ve added the following keybindings to gnome:
Alt+Return: "stiler.py swap" Alt+J: "stiler.py next" Alt-K: "stiler.py prev" Ctrl+Alt+Return: "stiler.py cycle"
That’s it. Now I can pretty much treat it like dwm. Pull up two or three terminals, hit alt-enter, and they line up just right. Alt-j and Alt-k move between the windows, and another alt-enter switches the main with the selected window.
I was looking just for this. Thanks.
Dumb question, Which gconf keys did you tinker to set these keyboard shortcuts ?
I just used the Keyboard Shortcuts editor from the gnome menu. Don’t have that laptop with me this week, sorry, or I’d probably be able to query it.
The new unity desktop uses compiz, which stiler unfortunately doesn’t work with by default, because it places all the desktops on one huge grid. Should be near trivial to fix, but I haven’t done it yet, so I’m not using stiler at the moment.
maybe I’ll aim to fix that tonight on my netbook, and then I should be able to answer your question too.
ah okay. thanks for the help.
btw, i dont use unity/gnome-shell. I am happy with the old gnome desktop and will stick to it for some more time. thanks.
Just FYI, motivated from your blog, I made a tiling script that works with compiz-enabled gnome desktop. link: http://code.google.com/p/metacity-tiler/
That is awesome, thanks! I’ll try it out.
Doesn’t seem to be working for me in Ubuntu natty:
# lua .config/mtiler/mstiler.lua
p: print info
w ?: switch to workspace ?
m ?: move current window to workspace ?
h : horizontal layout
v : vertical layout
parsed information:
lua: .config/mtiler/mstiler.lua:18: bad argument #1 to ‘sub’ (string expected, got nil)