KWin tiling ratios and orientations...

... now with minimize support.

KWin tiling has been proceeding forward at a steady rate. If you check out the latest revision, you will not only have a pretty stable experience, but will also get a design document for free.

So orientation is horizontal and vertical, and ratio is how much space the left child gets. Using these two properties I expect to be able to do most layouts. For now you can use D-BUS calls to actually use tiling pretty well.

Here are the calls

qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin slotToggleOrientation
qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin slotSetRatio <float> # between 0 and 1
qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin dumpTiles  # get a nice tree if you have debugging enabled and visible

Some applications will cause trouble. Especially some plasma widgets and Kruler aren't setting the right window attributes, so I can't exempt them from tiling. So don't launch panel settings or Kickoff menu, it won't look so well.

Minimize and restore works now, it will keep track of where the window was before you minimized it and put it back there.

Please leave feedback about bugs here or on the KWin mailing list, it will be appreciated.

Kwin : tree based tiling

In the quest to implement tiling in KWin, I've decided to use binary trees as an internal representation. This morning, I hacked on it to produce a decent prototype, just to check if the idea would work well enough, without introducing too much complexity in the code. At the moment, it does tend to crash or have repaint issues once in a while. But it works, and it does what tiling is supposed to do. Of course there is a lot to do yet. Moving and Resizing remain particularly icky because so many choices about what is good as a default, what is expected, how to implement it, will have to be made. If you are adventurous enough to try the kwin-tiling branch, do not move the windows, or basically abuse it in anyway :)

Internship and back to college

Well, my holiday has been cut short...

I'm leaving next Saturday to spend the last month and a half of my vacations in college.

I've received an internship opportunity to work as a Playtester and Beta-tester MILLEE.

I really enjoyed the short vacation though, I learnt to drive, did a lot of swimming, and hacked some decent code.

The last year (academic) has been really really unique, perhaps the most satisfying and enjoyable one. But thats for another post

KWin preliminary tiling

Yesterday I committed code which adds a semblance of tiling to kwin. Every time you launch a window, it will be maximized vertically, but each window shares the width of the screen equally. You can check out code from KDE svn. The location is /home/kde/branches/work/kwin-tiling/

You'll need to edit $KDEDIR/share/config/kwinrc and set Placement=Tiling.

Then you are ready to go.

Right now there are no configuration options, no key bindings, nothing! Still a long long way from a functional release.

Please leave feedback and bugs.