pytiling

Dynamic, mouse-based tiling for EWMH-Compliant Window Managers (basically all of them)

Requirements

• An EWMH-Compliant Window-Manager (you probably have one if you're on Linux)
• You're running X11 (not Wayland)
• wmctrl and xwininfo, install using your package manager
• Python 3
• pynput and python-xlib, install using pip install pynput and pip install python-xlib

Installation

After installing all requirements, simply run using python pytile.py.

Usage

Press the Hotkey Meta+Alt and click on a window when the crosshair cursor appears. This window will be moved into the background and go into tiling-mode. When adding more windows, they will be added into the slave-area of the layout (stacked on the right half of the screen). You can move tiled windows by dragging them to their intended spot. The layout will be preserved. You can also resize windows using the mouse. This will resize other windows accordingly. To remove a window from tiling mode, press Meta+Alt again and click on it. It will go back into floating mode and onto the normal layer.

Features

• Tiling (mouse-based)
• Gaps
• Multiple layouts
• Different Master-Area-Width

Missing features

• Configuration (You can't change the hotkey, gaps or the layout)
• Command-Line arguments
• More than one layout

Known bugs

• There is no _NET_WM_TYPE-Property for certain applications, e.g. steam. I'll probably just add a configurable whitelist later on.
• spotify doesn't work and I don't know why. However, spotify always causes problems with window managers.
• Certain windows (e.g. xfce4-terminal) cannot resize arbitrarily. Alignment may be off (or completely screwed, who knows). I might add a configurable blacklist as well, to sort out these problems.

Contributing

You can obviously contribute to this project by doing one of the following things:

• Using my software as a daily driver and reporting any crashes, bugs etc. in the Issues-section of GitHub
• Adding new layouts. A layout is a subclass of Layout and implements the functions calculate_regions(n) and on_resize(window)
  • calculate_regions(n) divides the rectangle self.screen into a list of n Rectangles. This will then define the layout
  • on_resize(window) is called when window is resized. This handles resizing and repositioning of other windows on a resize. Every other operation (including moving windows from one spot to the other) is handled by the superclass.
• Fixing bugs, writing documentation, improving code quality... If you improve the code, please create a pull request, I will review it then.