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by perihelions 1699 days ago
If you're interested in the tiling features of Pop OS, they're also available as a standalone extension for GNOME Shell. Very little friction to test them out (if you're already running GNOME).

https://github.com/pop-os/shell

https://support.system76.com/articles/pop-shell/

1 comments

I just want to open all windows floating and being able to manually snap windows in to a 3 columns grid, can this do it?
This sounds similar to some of my workflow when using Windows. PowerToys & fancyzones are really neat in that they let you pre-define specific "Snap zones" that you can then shift+drag windows on top of to resize them.

I tried Gtile on Fedora but found it wanting to emulate more of Linux's auto-tiling interfaces, which isn't what I want when using floating windows some of the time.

The Pop-Shell extension mentioned above was the best floating + tiling experience I'd used so far. Floating windows work like normal until you hit super+y where they'll begin to auto-tile & try to find sane spacing for the different windows onscreen.

You can cycle through those windows (and I believe resize them too) with keyboard commands, but also resize and drag around them with the mouse like normal. You can even drag them on top of each other to create "tabbed" windows behind one another with little selectors at the top.

I used this recently on a 12.5" (1080p) screen to reference Firefox on one half, while having my terminal, file browser, and text editor all "tabbed" on top of each other in the other half. Made it really smooth to fit all that into a small screen in a way that felt sane & easy to multitask with. I'd highly recommend trying that extension out and seeing if it can fill your needs, even if it's not 100% trying to fill Fancyzone's role.

window snapping is too slow for me (have to do 3 things: activation, resize, move to edge/center, the later 2 even require sicky keys)

I don't find the tilling feature useful at all and of course this is my personal gripe with tilling in general.

The last thing you want is having your windows perfect then ANY new window or dialog open automatically messes it up and you have to "re-organize" every time. Setting layout should be a one and done thing.

Nope, I want the same thing and just turned off the tiling desktop feature because it was easier to manually juggle them.
Try a gnome extension called gtile
It's not keyboard-driven, that's a bummer.

In the past, I used an extension called Put Windows that was perfect for my need, but that stopped working on Gnome 40.

I used Gnome for a while and I just made my own very simple extension then, which was just a bunch of keybindings to move and resize the focused window. Super for a 2x2 grid or Super + Shift for a 3x2 grid, plus a Numpad key to place the window on the grid.

I guess it would still work with 40 because of how simple it was, but even if not, it would most probably be trivial to update, so you might want to consider this route.

I don't believe so