Make keyboard driven

[Praful]

Thank you for providing this app. I currently use gTile but it's buggy and now unmaintained. Here are some suggestions and questions:

1. Some of us try to use just the keyboard but this app requires a mouse. Can you make the app keyboard driven. This is what gTile does:

• press shortcut key
• a grid is show with each region having a number
• when a number is typed, the current app goes into that region

2. An alternative and more flexible option than (1) above is:

• have a grid with each region (cell) having a number
• when two numbers are pressed, the numbers represent the top left corner and bottom right corner
  and that is where the app is placed. This is what the Gnome extension tactile does. It's
  flexible because you can define one grid and use on multiple workspaces but still have different
  layouts by pressing different numbers.

3. When using multiple workspaces, can the app have different grids for each workspace? And restore
   the grid and apps in the regions after restarting

Thanks

[BasGeertsema]

Thanks for your suggestion! I agree, that it would be nice to have separate, keyboard driven, way of snapping windows into regions. The tactile way of doing it sounds flexible: if you press a single number after the shortcut then it is snapped into that region, if you press two numbers than it will expand to cover both regions.

A difference is that fancytiles does not have a regular grid and in many cases not all regions can be 'merged' easily together, so we'll have to think about a intuitive way to deal with this.

[Praful]

@BasGeertsema thanks for replying. I'm not sure when you mean by merging regions but let me give an explicit example of what I meant. Then you can decide how big a change would be required if you go with this idea.

Imagine this grid for your monitor. It can be designed using the current FancyTiles method of defining regions.

+---+---+---+
| 1 | 2 | 3 |
+---+---+---+
| 4 | 5 | 6 |
+---+---+---+
| 7 | 8 | 9 |
+---+---+---+

Let's say this grid appears when you press WIN+T. Your hands are off the keyboard now. Then you press 1 (release the key) then 8. After you press 8, the current app will occupy cells (regions?) 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8.

If you then press WIN+T again and press 3 and 9, the current app will occupy cells 3, 6, 9. This splits the screen 2/3 and 1/3 between the two apps.

The cells represent coordinates. The top left coordinate of the first number's cell denotes the top-left of the app. The bottom right coordinate of the second number's cell denotes the bottom right of the app. If you press the same number twice, the app will occupy that cell.

The more cells you have on the screen, the more flexible the layout. For example, you can have more overlapping apps. In the above example, you could press '1' and '8' for the first app and '2' and '9' for the second app. The two apps will overlap in cells 2, 5, 8.

If the number of cells exceeded 10 (0-9), you could switch to letters, which would give you 26 cells for the English alphabet.

I hope this makes sense. Thank you for considering this!

[BasGeertsema]

I was referring to the fact that they layout in FancyTiles does not to be a regular grid like in your example. In an irregular layout the rows and column dividers do not line up which makes it less straight-forward to merge regions into a single larger one.

However, as of now there is the ability to merge regions using the mouse. So the next step would be to have a mechanism in place to have a more keyboard-drive approach.

[Praful]

Thanks. There was a bug in Cinnamon extension gTile, which I fixed, I then added the feature I wanted. As you implied, it's easier to add this because the tiles are on a regular grid. With the new feature enabled, you can enter two letters and the current window is resized to fit the rectangle defined by the two letters.

Your app is more flexible - and being maintained. For now, the feature I've added to gTile is good enough for me. I'll check back here periodically to see progress.

The gTile link is
https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon-spices-extensions/tree/master/gTile%40shuairan