I’m used to a KDE behavior where I could assign a key to move a window to the right or left half of the screen. This no longer works on Plasma 5.27.5. I’ve also spun up a VM with the latest nightly unstable developer (2025-01-05 0043) which has Plasma 6.2.80 to test that, and I cannot set up this behavior there either.
In Plasma 6.2.80, the Quick Tile bug 466031 – Per-virtual-desktop tiling layouts is still present, but I note the last comment there says it is fixed in 6.3.0. I will try to figure out how to get that version of Plasma for testing.
But even Quick Tile is only part of the old behavior. It lets me throw a window to the left, right, top, or bottom half of my screen. I would then like to be able to resize a window so that there is some overlap. There is a KWin option for “Move window left/right/up/down” which moves a window to the edge, but does not resize it.
Is there some way to have Quick Tile but only the movement portion, not the locking to other windows? Or to have Move behavior also resize?
Meta + arrow will move windows to the edges or corners… meta+dn, then meta+rt will put the window in the lower right corner, for example.
if you do so with more than one windows their edges will line up and you can adjust their split lines by grabbing an edge.
you can even get quick tiled windows to over lap if you assign it to a corner, tile it with another window along the opposite edge, then retile the corner window to the upper edge… now you have two tiled windows overlapping in the corner.
but if you want a window to over lap another window, why not just use floating windows?
I’m not looking for a new workflow. I’m slightly frustrated that a behavior that’s existed for a decades has been removed, and I’m trying to recreate it.
Throw windows to left or right side, then be able to adjust one window, seems like a reasonable user interaction. It’s worked in the past :(.
Meta+rt will cast a window to the right edge of the screen full height.
you can then drag the left edge of the window where you want it and other floating windows can be either in front or behind it.
if you don’t like the meta+arrow shortcut, you can change it to whatever you are used to under the shortcuts setting page, kwin application section.
there are also shortcuts for move window left / right /up / down that are unspecified in my settings (default) but you can add your own shortcuts there.
Your example of Meta+rt (a.k.a Quick Tile) is great for 1 window. If you do 1 left and 1 right though, then things get messy - they become attached. I’m looking to avoid that.
Your example of “move left/right” doesn’t resize.
My last sentence in the original post makes it very clear what I’m looking for: “Quick Tile but only the movement portion, not the locking. Or Move behavior also resize”.
It’s become clear from many other posts that this behavior has been removed. It boggles the mind that decade old features get removed from any software, and especially from KDE which prides itself on providing all the options.
I don’t know the specifics of that situation, but as a general note - sometimes when folks see longstanding features being removed, behind-the-scenes there is decades-old code that provided that feature in the past, and no longer works alongside code changes needed to fix something else.
Trade-offs may have to be made in those cases - fixing or adding something major sometimes requires losing something that’s used less broadly, or is less critical, in order to try to maintain overall quality.
so you want it to resize the first window to fill half the screen, but you don’t want another window tiled similarly to the other half the screen to be attached to the first one at the middle?
isn’t that a main feature of a tiling system?
i suppose you could assign a shortcut to move lf/rt and then use the shortcut for maximize vertically on each window and in that case you would have no tiling going on but it would look like it was tiled until your dragged the free edge of either window.
Yes, that is exactly what I want. I guess this is not tiling, which is why I’ve also pointed out the “Window Move” option in Kwin (but that only moves, does not resize).
Thank you for your supposition of move-then-maximize vertically. If this worked it would take extra keystrokes over the old behavior, but I could live with that. Unfortunately it does not work. “Move window left/right” doesn’t default to left edge or right edge, it moves it to some random locations I have trouble understanding, that are likely based on other window edges. It also does not resize to take up half the width.
I’ve downloaded kde development and am trying to build kwin and will submit a patch if I can figure this out.
another possible path to getting the same result would be to use quick tile to get the window located and sized how you want it then “convert” that window to floating without changing the size or location.
this would require some kind of script tho… probably trivial if you know what you are doing… i do not.