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Poor Man’s Tiling Window Manager

Update April 8, 2009: uh_no_hu’s is still expanding the functionality of his tiling window manager script. Since my post 4 new feature’s have been added: vertical, horizontal, maximize, max_all. The homepage has also changed to a new location. You can discuss the window manager on the Arch Linux forums.

Original February 14, 2009: Poor Man’s Tiling Window Manager is uh_no_hu’s attempt to add basic tiling window functionality to the desktop, independent of the used desktop environment or window manager. It is known to work with pekwm,  openbox and metacity. It’s a small python script that should be assigned to key combinations and currently provides 4 features:

• tiling – the basic tiling layout: one window in the main column (left) with all the other windows at the side (right)
• left – put the active window to the left
• right – put the active window the the right
• swap – swich the active window with the window in the main column

The wanted option is to be provided as an argument of the python script. The script relies on wmctrl and xdotool so make sure you have these two packages. Otherwise the script will not work.

The left/right option is somewhat similar to a function of the new Windows 7 that sticks a window the side. Tiling and swap are the classic features that come with a true tiling window manager.

Though it is not a full replacement for true tiling window managers, it can be considered as an add-on for regular window managers. Whereas someone will use a true tiling window manager (dwm, xmonad, awesome, wmii, ..) to get full tiling support, someone less technical should really try out this easy to use script because most, if not all true tiling window managers tend to be difficult to configure/use.

To give you an idea of how the tiling layout looks like, here’s a nice picture: