Snap windows to 1/3 of screen

Question

I've got two monitors side-by-side, one in landscape, and the other in portrait mode. For the portrait monitor, I would love to be able to snap windows to the bottom, middle, and top thirds of the screen. Halves is too much vertical screen space for most things I work on. Is there an application to customize the snap behavior to that extent?

Ubuntu 17.10

Solution

Have a look at the gnome extension "gTile".

From the readme:

Gnome-shell extension that improves window tiling capabilities of stock gnome-shell. gTile is used to moves/resize windows on a configurable grid scheme.

When you click on the gTile icon it will open a dialog that lets you draw a region on an e. g. 1x3 grid. Once you have drawn the region gTile will move and resize the currently active windows to match that region on the real screen.

You can configure a hot key (for instance ctrl+alt+1) to send the current window to a specific field in an NxM grid. In your case it could be the first field in a 1x3 grid. Likewise for the other two windows.

Comments

[sudodus]

You can control the position and size of the windows in Xorg with the program wmctrl. See man wmctrl and maybe find some tutorials that give detailed examples via the internet. Install from the repositories with sudo apt install wmctrl

[Ctrl-C]

Thanks! Especially shortcuts without gui are great: github.com/gTile/gTile#usage-with-no-interface Placement format is underdocumented, it goes like this: {grid_width}x{grid_height} {start_x}:{start_y} {end_x}:{end_y}.

[Pierre D]

it's a bit weird to have to install this via a web browser extension (I would have expected some apt install instead, but anyway seems to work well. It also seems much, much more powerful than what I had in mind -- which is what the OP was asking for (just snap to thirds). Very interesting; opens horizons :-)