Floating/Manual tiling window management.

[ZoomyCat]

I've mainly used floating window managers and decided to give i3 a shot. I find the automated tiling does not give me enough control over specifically where the windows are including the sizes. I would like to achieve a specific workflow with i3.

I've tried the floating mode and I find the functionality provided within the move and resize functions are not enough to create the keybindings to make floating mode into a manual tiling mode. In some cases I think the move functions are bugged for multi monitors in the current state.

resize functions requested.
resize set height 50 <ppt, px>
resize set width 50 <ppt, px>
This would resize the window height to 50% the current display size.

move functions - Bugs
i3-msg move absolute position center
With 2 monitors this moves the window in between both monitors. This makes sense being the absolute center.
i3-msg move position center
When ran once this some what seems to aim for the center of my left monitor but misses, It seems like it is correct on the height but not on the width. Running it a second time it centers the width and pushes the window up so the title is outside of the frame. My left monitor is 1600x900 and my right monitor is 1920x1080. It seems like it is centering upon the 1600 on the first monitor for the width and then putting its location at the 1080 height mark.

It would make sense for i3-msg move position center to move the window to the center of the current monitor.

The functionality I would like added to move is also the ability to push the window all the way any direction.
i3-msg move to position <top-left, top, top-right, right, center, left, bottom-left, bottom, bottom-right>

Specifically the workflow I would like to achieve is a system where I have toggle presets for a mod+kp_# and it both resizes and moves the window at the same time to the location.

For each corner it could do 50% height and width first for having a 4 application grid on your monitor. second it would do 33% height and width so you could have a 9 application grid. The other two options would be a mix of 50%HW/30%HW. This would cover running 6 applications both vertically or horizontally depending on needs for the corner cases.

The top/bottom and sides would have the same rules except the height and width is reversed, I will explain for the sides. The first press should give 100% height and 50% width. The second 33% both width and height. The third press giving 33% width and 50% height.

The center button should resize first to 33% height, 33% width and then fullscreen.

What are your thoughts on these proposed changes?

[i3bot]

I don’t see a link to logs.i3wm.org. Did you follow http://i3wm.org/docs/debugging.html? (In case you actually provided a link to a logfile, please ignore me.)

[i3bot]

I don’t see a version number. Could you please copy & paste the output of i3 --version into this issue?

[Airblader]

Can you please split this into one ticket per issue? Otherwise the discussion will get too confusing and any changes will likely have to be separate PRs, too.

[ZoomyCat]

Will do. Would you like me to update this issue with the links to the other issues?

[Airblader]

Also please be specific on whether you talk about floating or tiling windows. We generally don't support the floating mode all too much. It's meant for popups, dialogs and the like. We don't really aim to support the usecase of floating all kinds of windows as a workflow.

Would you like me to update this issue with the links to the other issues?

We don't have thousands of tickets. It'll be fine. :)

[ZoomyCat]

Ah but if you could with a few simple changes would you?

[Airblader]

That highly depends on the usecase of the feature (and of course the complexity), so let's decide when you presented the feature and usecase. :) Also note that the actual decision will be done by @stapelberg.

[ZoomyCat]

Alright. Now I just need to figure out how to split these up so they make sense. 😸

[Airblader]

I'm going to close this as we agreed on splitting it (which happened).