Unlike my old laptop with its 15.4″ screen and maximum resolution of 1024×768, I don’t always run with windows maximized on the new laptop (widescreen, 14.1″, 1280×800).
That means I’ve got a lot more room to move windows around and use my screen smartly.
I’ve been working on ways to do that, and found that some sort of tiling, where windows butt up against each other is what I want most of the time.
Linux has several window managers that are specifically for tiling (and, even better, work really well with the keyboard), but when I looked into them, they mostly made a lot of little boxes. I didn’t want little boxes–I just wanted windows to butt up against each other.
Enter Openbox, a nice light-weight window manager. It has a GrowToEdgeEast (or North, South, West) function you can assign to a hotkey.
I bound them to Windows + an arrow key. So now, when I’ve got a window focused, I can hold windows and start hitting arrows to grow it to the edges of the screen or other windows.
Even better, if I keep hitting left, for example, after the left edge hits one edge, it’ll go to the next one. When it gets to the edge of the screen, the right edge of the window will start moving to the left, stopping at the edge of each other window that’s up.
That gives me even more flexibility than I was looking for in the first place.
Here’s what I added to my ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml to get the keybindings:
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You forgot to add the file