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I would like to drag my windows to the left or right side of the desktop and have them automatically resized like it works with Gnome or Windows 7. And to maximize them when dragging them to the top. How is that possible in Xfce?

Braiam
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Paul Woitaschek
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3 Answers3

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12.10 and above

Tiling snap is built into the XFCE window manager, just drag your windows to the edges of the screen for the snap to occur.

11.10 & 12.04

If you want the "tiling-snap" of compiz you will need to get your coding-hands dirty because this was made available as a code-patch for these two ubuntu releases.

According to this article - there is a patch available to enable windows tiling (aka windows snap) for the xfwm4 compositing manager.

There is a great you-tube video showing this in action.

enter image description here

I have applied this patch and uploaded this to my PPA.

to install

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fossfreedom/xfwm4
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xfwm4

logout and login

If don't want to install the modified xfce window manager, you will need to use compiz as your compositing manager to enable tiling:

sudo apt-get install compiz compizconfig-settings-manager

Then add compiz --replace ccp & to your autostart programs list.

Community
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fossfreedom
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  • Worked well thank you. Is it possible to configure it the way, that when I move the window to the upper border, it maximizes instead of going over half of the screen? – Paul Woitaschek Feb 27 '12 at 13:11
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    I applied the archlinux patch directly to the ubuntu xwfm4 source. So I guess, if the capability you want wasnt already in that patch, then the request will need to go to the archlinux developers themselves. The capabilities enabled in the patch is as shown in the video - dragging to the top tiles the window over the top half of the screen. – fossfreedom Feb 27 '12 at 13:13
  • @ph1b - just to make clear - if you see some really good changes in the future to the arch-linux patch, ping me the details and I'll try my best to revise my PPA. – fossfreedom Feb 27 '12 at 13:28
  • I have tried to build xfwm4-tiling as alez has suggested, but failed. But there was a comment on this 'half of an adder' blog (alez's link) and this comment suggested to try X Tile. I would like to say that from my humble opinion it is far better than xfwm4-tiling. Why? Because you do not need to manually drag windows in order to tile them. With X Tile you get a small menu in the notification area, which has a lot of predefined tiling schemes and it works really nice. I recommend to give it a try. – skanatek Apr 07 '12 at 10:04
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To get window tiling to work in 12.10 you have to disable wrap_windows.

Run the following in the terminal to enable tiling:

xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/wrap_windows -s false

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For an easier instalation of xfwm-tiling you can use this tutorial: Building xfwm4tiling. Maybe you will have to change a couple of version numbers but it worked wonderfully for me. If not, you will allways have the compiz route. If you have a 32bit system i still have the .deb on my comp but i strongly suggest you to build it yourself.

alez
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