Posted on by Martin Flöser

Quick tiling and TabBox updates

During the last weeks quite some work has gone into KWin, which is great and needs to be mentioned here. First of all a big thanks to Hugo Pereira for his work on Nitrogen. You might have heard that we imported Nitrogen from kde-look.org to replace Ozone. Lots of work and realy great improvements has gone into it and it’s just awesome that we can provide the two highest rated window decorations from kde-look in the next KDE release. If you want to see some screenshots have a look at the web gallery. I hope we will finally merge Nitrogen back into Oxygen and only provide one decoration.

As already mentioned in the dot story I worked on a feature known as “Aero Snap” during Tokamak. (Btw. big thanks to Mario for the great event and thanks to the Plasma crew for the invitation. You are a great group of people 😀 And I hope I will find the time to go to next Tokamak.) Currently a new contributor, Robin, is working on adding keybindings to quick tiling, so it will rock even more. It’s difficult to show it in a screenshot, but here it is:

Von KWin

Finally (un)loading effects does not result in flicker any more. This is a real improvement but it feels strange when you are used to the flicker as indication that the changes were successfully applied. The fix will be backported to 4.3.2 and thanks a lot to Robin for the help on that one.

One of the biggest changes for 4.4 so far is the new TabBox which has been merged into trunk today. I already blogged about it but some things have been improved since last time. It’s now possible to have two independent switchers with different shortcuts. So you can have for example alt+tab with windows from all desktops and meta+tab with windows only from current desktop. It’s also possible to assign different effects to the two switchers which allows to use both the “normal” TabBox as well as a fancy switcher (when effects are disabled it will of course fall back to the normal switcher). Most improvements went into the classic switcher so far, but some will be implemented in the effects as well. E.g. switching with cursor keys might be useful if you use Present Windows. One of the nice new features is that you can close a window with middle click on the entry in the list.

Since my last blog post I improved the KCM as well. The layout bits were moved into an own dialog with a live preview (sorry for the black border, it worked correctly yesterday evening):

Von TabBox
Von TabBox

7 Replies to “Quick tiling and TabBox updates”

  1. This is totally awesome! Thanks so much for your great work.

    7 took a lot of good ideas from KDE4, so it is only fair if KWin borrows some of 7s good features.

    Love it!

  3. Do you think it would be feasible to allow moving windows by not dragging the caption bar but by clicking and dragging any place within the window that is not covered by a widget?

    As KWin does not know anything about the internal layout of a window that is IMO impossible. And I would say there is nothing in a window which isn’t a widget (or canvas).

  4. [quote]As KWin does not know anything about the internal layout of a window that is IMO impossible. And I would say there is nothing in a window which isn’t a widget (or canvas).[quote]

    Well… Bespin (kwin decoration) has pretty cool option where you can drag any window from ‘the background’

  7. Great to hear there are some nice improvements for kwin coming up in 4.4. 🙂 The first screenshot still looks a bit messy, though I’m not sure how that can be fixed…

    > Do you think it would be feasible to allow moving windows by not dragging the caption bar but by clicking and dragging any place within the window that is not covered by a widget?

    Hold Alt down, and you can. 🙂 This is a standard X11 feature Kwin also implements. With the RMB / middlebutton you can also resize windows, or push them backwards.

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