#18 Quick Tile Shortcut Suggestions for Fedora
Closed: Deferred to upstream 2 years ago by michaeltunnell. Opened 3 years ago by michaeltunnell.

KDE Plasma has some cool functions that not really discoverable at all by most users and in particular here are the Quick Title Shortcuts. The issue is that some are set (some of these poorly) and some of them aren't set at all.

Current Settings for KWin's Quick Tiling shortcuts:
Window Quick Tile Bottom=Super+Down
Window Quick Tile Left=Super+Left
Window Quick Tile Right=Super+Right
Window Quick Tile Top=Super+Up
Window Quick Tile Bottom Left=none
Window Quick Tile Bottom Right=none
Window Quick Tile Top Left=none
Window Quick Tile Top Right=none

These need adjustment because the Up and Down are wasted on uncommon usage behavior. The Left and Right 50% vertical tiling defaults are good.

The problem with the Up & Down shortcuts is they are set for 50% horizontal tiling which is uncommon compared to the common usage of these shortcuts for Toggling Maximize/Restore (Super+Up) & Minimizing windows (Super+Down) as these have become somewhat of a standard across multiple DEs.

KDE Plasma's defaults for Maximize and Minimize are awkward at best with Super+PageUp & Super+PageDown. The reason these are awkward is that these are much more commonly desired by users and in the case of Laptop usage these are often locked behind an additional layer of including the Function key, effectively making the shortcut Super+Fn+PageUp/PageDown.

Here are my suggested settings for this issue:
Window Quick Tile Bottom=Super+End
Window Quick Tile Left=Super+Left
Window Quick Tile Right=Super+Right
Window Quick Tile Top=Super+Home
Window Quick Tile Bottom Left=Super+Del
Window Quick Tile Bottom Right=Super+PgDown
Window Quick Tile Top Left=Super+Ins
Window Quick Tile Top Right=Super+PgUp
+
Window Maximize=Super+Up
Window Minimize=Super+Down

  • Tile Left and Right would say where they are.
  • This would change the Quick Tiles to use a grid style for keys when referring to the 1/4 corner tiles and the horizontal top and bottom tiles.
  • doing this would move maximize and minimize from the default to the above suggestion and I think this is the better layout because it puts more valuable shortcuts on more valuable actions that are also used in other interfaces/DEs for consistent usability.

This provides a location for all of the tiling options in a reasonable layout on most keyboards including even most compact form-factors.


Note 1: Admittedly there is no perfect solution due to the limitation of unpredictable variations of laptop layouts. With that said, most laptop layouts can still use these options adding in the Fn key. Trying to find a solution to cover all keyboard layouts is basically impossible with this many shortcuts and variables in play.

Note 2: The ideal method of tiling in a DE form via manual shortcuts is actually not currently possible in Plasma and that is context-aware tiling but unfortunately, we deal with what we have for now.

Note 3: there is a Laptop compensation option of introducing other modifiers to the Arrow Keys layout such as Super+(Shift_or_Alt)+Up/Down/Left/Right being for the 1/4 (quarter) tiling options. In fact, this and the grid layout I suggested could be done thanks to the Global Alternate system in Plasma.


Visual Representation of the Grid Style Layout:

quick-tile-kwin-shortcuts.jpg


Metadata Update from @ngompa:
- Issue tagged with: experience

3 years ago

Plasma 5.20 (beta available in rawhide) will improve this a bit: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/50
Indeed, context-aware tiling is the best, I miss it from Cinnamon.

it seems that KDE Plasma 5.20 solved this previous issue and has made the process much easier so I think this can be closed now. 🐧😎👍

Metadata Update from @michaeltunnell:
- Issue close_status updated to: Deferred to upstream
- Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)

2 years ago

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