Is there any way (shortcut) to tile a window to 1/4th of the screen width?

Support & Help Requests
#1

I'm on MATE 1.26; I very often use tiling, especially tiling a window to half width of the screen (via keyboard shortcut).

Is there any way (via shortcut, or a sequence of shortcuts) to tile a window to 1/4th of the screen width? Essentially, I'd like to have one half of the screen to contain two vertical "stripes".

I'm aware that I can do the same operation, but with horizontal "stripes", and also, that I can use Alt+F8 to tile to half screen, then resize (but that's very slow). However, none of the two solution fulfills my requirement.

#2

I think i3 tile manager can do it ...

#3

The quick way in Ubuntu MATE to get a window to a vertical 1/4 of the screen far left is to press the key combination Super + ← twice in succession. and for far right you press Super + → twice in succession. To get windows into the middle two stripes you can use the previous keystrokes then use Alt + F7 and the arrow keys to move the window where you want it.

1 Like
#4

Thanks for the reply!

I remember doing something similar, but it doesn't work (anymore; I was previously on Ubuntu MATE 20.04, while now I'm on 22.04). Invoking the given action twice (e.g. Super + →) re-centers the window.

Is any setting that I could change, or should I file this as bug?

#5

I am running 22.04 on my system and the above mentioned shortcuts work like a charm.
I don't think this is a Mate bug.

For settings that you could change:
You could open control-center -> keyboard shortcuts where all window actions can be set.

#6

The shortcut itself works. When invoking the action once, it tiles the current window to the given side.
However, invoking the action twice, recenters it, instead of turning it into a "fourth of screen".

The list of key shortcuts is not related, I think. It only has six entries related to tiling:

  • tiling to right/left
  • tiling to top right/left
  • tiling to bottom right/left

So invoking the shortcut twice is not in the list of bindings.

#7

Since I can't reproduce this behaviour on my computer there is not much I can do.
but there is one thing I know of that you could check:

if you have a shortcut connected to two tasks at the same time, for example : if, on your computer a tiling function has the same shortcut as fullscreentoggle (or something else), both are executed (except if both have opposite actions, then only one is executed but we can not predict which one)
Check if your shortcut key really appears only once in the list (the whole list)

#8

Thanks for the help! Makes sense, I'll try.