V-Tile

An easy way to tile windows vertically, specifying the number of columns. I have an ultra wide monitor and run Xubuntu. There are built-in commands to tile 2 windows easily, but nothing to easily tile more than 2 windows. I manually tile 3 windows often enough and wanted a way to automate it. I extended originally developed the script to tile 3 windows, but extended it to tile windows to any number of columns.

I developed this for my own use on Xubuntu. I have no idea if it will work on Windows or MacOS. If it does, let me know, and/or make a pull request to the documentation!

- Dan Gleason

Dependencies

The script uses xdotool internally to manage windows. Install it with:

sudo apt -y install xdotool

Or, install it from source from the xdotool Github repository: https://github.com/jordansissel/xdotool

Installation

First off, install the dependencies if you haven't done so already.

To install, you will want to clone the Github repository and store the script in a directory. For these examples, let's call the installation directory VTILE_ROOT_DIR.

$ git clone https://github.com/dnlglsn/vtile.git
$ cp vtile/vtile.py VTILE_ROOT_DIR

The commands you run will be similar to python VTILE_ROOT_DIR/vtile.py ....

Usage

V-Tile is a Python script, called from the command line. I developed it using Python3, but it works just fine with Python2.

Here is the output from argparse:

$ python vtile.py --help
usage: vtile.py [-h] [-p POSITION] [-c COLUMNS]
               [-m MARGIN MARGIN MARGIN MARGIN] [-b BORDER BORDER]

Vertically tile windows.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -p POSITION, --position POSITION
                        The column number to move the window to. The default
                        is 0.
  -c COLUMNS, --columns COLUMNS
                        The number of columns on the screen. The default is 3
  -m MARGIN MARGIN MARGIN MARGIN, --margin MARGIN MARGIN MARGIN MARGIN
                        The number of pixels around the edge of the screen (N,
                        E, S, W) to ignore. The default is [0, 0, 0, 40]
  -b BORDER BORDER, --border BORDER BORDER
                        The number of pixels on each window (Width, Height)
                        for theme decoration. The default is [10, 31]

Margin

The margin is the number of pixels on each side of the screen to ignore. They are the areas where your window manager's toolbars go. You usually don't want windows covering up this area, so specify the pixel sizes for each of the edges of the screen, in a North, East, South, West manner.

In the above example, there is a toolbar on the top of the screen (the North side) that is 25 pixels tall, and another toolbar on the left side of the screen (the West side) that is 50 pixels wide. There are no toolbars on the right (East) or bottom (South) sides of the screen. Therefore, the --margin (or -m) argument you would set on the command line would be: 25 0 0 50. The default is 0 0 0 0.

Border

The border is the amount of window decorations your window manager adds to each window. It is where the window resize borders, title, and window icons reside. We need to take this into account when resizing a window, as xdotool doesn't know or care what window manager you are using.

In the above example, the top of each window has a 25 pixel tall area where the title and window icons live. It also has a 20 pixel resize border around the right, bottom, and left sides of each window. The border argument you would want to set is the sum of the borders in each width and height direction. In this example, the border width would be 10 + 10 = 20, and the border height would be 25 + 10 = 35. Therefore, you would specify the --border (or -b) argument on the command line as 20 35. The default is 0 0.

Columns and Position

The columns is the number of columns you want on the screen. Each window will fill a single column. The 'position' argument is which column position you want the window to fill, starting from position number 0 and increasing in number to the right.

In the example above, there are 3 columns. Therefore, you would specify the --columns (or -c) argument on the command line to be 3. The default number of columns is 3. The blue column is in position 0, specified on the command line as --position 0 (or -p 0). The orange is in position 1 and the yellow is in position 2. The default position is 0.

3 Window Setup on XFCE

Here is a step-by-step guide on installing and setting up the script to use 3 columns in XFCE.

1. Clone the Github repository, as above in the Installation section.
2. Open your XFCE settings manager, by clicking on Whiskermenu and clicking on the "All Settings" icon.
3. Click on "Keyboard" under the "Hardware" section.
4. Click on the "Application Shortcuts" tab at the top of the window.
5. Click on the "Add" button at the bottom of the window.
6. For the "Command", enter python VTILE_ROOT_DIR/vtile.py. Click on "Ok".
7. Enter the key shortcut you want for the leftmost column. I use "Super+Shift+1".
8. Add another shortcut by clicking "Add" at the bottom of the window.
9. For the "Command", enter python VTILE_ROOT_DIR/vtile.py --pos 1. Click on "Ok".
10. Enter the key shortcut you want for the middle column. I use "Super+Shift+2".
11. Add another shortcut by clicking "Add" at the bottom of the window.
12. For the "Command", enter python VTILE_ROOT_DIR/vtile.py --pos 2. Click on "Ok".
13. Enter the key shortcut you want for the middle column. I use "Super+Shift+3".

Remember: The VTILE_ROOT_DIR is the location where you put the vtile.py script and is not set up automatically. It is just a placeholder for use within this documentation.

There you go, now you have a 3 column setup with easy keyboard shortcuts.