Posts for the month of May 2023

Grid-based Tiling Window Management, Mark III, aka QuickGridZones

With a laptop and a 4K monitor, I wind up with a large number of windows scattered across my screens. The general disarray of scattered and randomly offset windows drives me nuts.

I've done some work to address this problem before (here and here), which I had been referring to as "quicktile". But that's what KDE called its implementation that allowed snapping the window to either half of the screen, or to some quarter. On Windows, there's a Power Tool called "Fancy Zones" that also has a few similarities. In an effort to disambiguate what I've built, I've renamed my approach to "Quick Grid Zones".

Since the last post on this, I've done some cleanup of the logic and also ported it to work on Windows.

This isn't a cross-platform implementation, but rather three implementations with some structural similarities, implemented on top of platform-specific tools.

  • Linux KDE - KDE global shortcuts that call a Python script using xdotool, wmctrl, and xprop
  • Mac OS - a lua script for ​Hammerspoon
  • Windows - an ​AutoHotKey2 script

Simple demo of running this on KDE:

Grab the local tarball for this release, or check out the QuickGridZones project page.