Contents

• Why
• The target
• What we need
• Yeal, show me the code!

Why

If you have 10+ GUI applications running and spend lots of time
dragging them to the right place, you need a tiling window manager.

On contrary to most modern window systems, which allow you to put one
window on top of another, and mess up your work space, a tiling window
manager will arrange all your windows tiling around your work space,
with no extra space wasted, and no window overlap. Tiling window
managers are good for people who cares more about efficiency, on both
time and screen space assets. The most famous tiling window managers
are ion and wmii.

However, when using a real tiling window manager like the two above,
you lost some freedom: because all the windows are forced to be tiled
around, it is hard to use some multi-window programs, like Gimp. You
can run another window manager inside ion, but you’d quickly get lost
between those two running window managers.

Also the above two both have efficiency and low footprint in mind when
building, so they are not as flexible and there’s not too much options
you can customized and not too much fancy features.

Today we’ll emulate the most part of a tiling window manager with
Fvwm, without losing any flexible and/or fancy stuffs like a
transparent menu system.

The target

We’ divide our screen to totally 16 (4×4) blocks, and the goal is to
make any window resize to 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12, or 16 blocks with
some simple key strokes, and place it at the upper left corner of any
of these 16 blocks.

And instead of assuming you are using a 1024×768 screen in my
previous article, we’ll make it fit no matter what the screen
resolution is.

What we need

We won’t need too much Fvwm commands for this:

Maximize

This is the command we’ll use to resize our windows. If it is
called without any argument, the current window will be toggled
between a maximize and a normal status. If we want to force
it to maximize, we add a True argument, if we want to force
it normal, we pass a False. And if we add two numbers after
that, it will be the percentage of the screen size, horizontal and
vertical, accordingly. For example, if we want to resize a window to
hold three blocks horizontal, and 1 block vertical, we use:

Maximize True 75 25

Move

We’ve talked about this in the previous article. But unlike
specify the absolute point there, we use relative numbers like the
Maximize command above. The trick is easy: Just remove the
post-fix p. So if we want to move the upper left corner of a
window to the middle of the screen, we say:

Move 50 50

Popup

This will pop up a menu with the given name. Very useful when we
want a cascading menu system.

OK, so here’s pretty much all what we need. Easy?

Yeal, show me the code!

OK, here’s all the code:

Get the idea? I use Small, Big, Half, and Horizont,
Vertical, Quarter to name how to separate the 16 blocks
here. Two more thing: The & creates a shortcut key for the menu
item, and the + “” Nop line makes a separator line in the menu.

Now all you need is binding the function QuickWindowMenu to some key
stroke or mouse click on a window. And as this has been talked in our
previous article, this is left for you as an exercise

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Tags: freebsd, Fvwm, ion, window manager, wmii