Compiz vs Aero Snap, Round 2, Fight!

Now that we've seen tiling is nothing new to any operating system, let's take a look at how it's implemented.

Windows 7 gives you some good options to manage tiling. The default is the Aero Snap, which let's you manage two windows by dragging them to the screen edges. The limit to this is that it only allows you to manage two Windows at a time. What happens if you want to tile three or more windows?

You can always just snap additonal windows, and leave them stacked on top of each other. It hides the Windows in the background, but it is a simple matter to alt+tab to bring the window you want to the foreground.

Microsoft left in most of the tiling manager from XP. If you right click on the dock (I mean taskbar) you can tile and cascade all open windows. It gives you the option of tiling them vertically (windows are side by side) or horizontally (stacked on top of each other.) Microsoft, for whatever reason, left out the grid option. (With three or more windows this option displays windows in a pre-arranged grid.)

If you want to tile specific windows, you have to resort to manually grabbing them and using Aero snap, or opening the task manager and ctrl+clicking the applications you want to tile.

Here's a video:



Ubuntu with Compiz gives us three different tiling options. The default is the grid plugin.

The grid divides the screen into 8 regions. By default it uses the numeric keypad to manage windows along that grid. You place the foreground window in a corresponsing location by hitting ctl+alt+ numpad key. For instance, if I want a screen to tile horizontally across the top of the screen, I hit ctrl+alt+num8. The window takes up the top half of the screen. If I select another window and hit ctrl+alt+num2 it will tile across the bottom half of the screen. 4 and 6 do the same for left and right. 7, 9, 1, and 3 will reduce the windows to squares and place them in the corresponding corners.

An added feature to grid is that each area has three levels of tiling. Re-entering the hotkey sequence toggles through resizing the window to occupy 1/3, 1/2, and 2/3 of the screen.

Here's an explanation of how to bind it to the mouse:



Here's a video of the main function, the explanation starts at 1:43:



The next option for tiling is the Maximumize plugin. This plugin is a bit more fluid than grid. It allows you to control which direction a window expands or contracts in. By default windows are controlled through hot keys. The primary hotkey is super+m. It will cause the selected window to expand in all directions until it encounters another window or fills the screen. There are options to expand only vertically, only horizontally, only up, only down, only left, and only right. There are corresponding minimizing options as well.

Here's a video:


The final option is the the tiling plugin. It maps traditional tiling to hotkeys, and will tile all open windows simultaneously. It has hotkeys for using the grid, tiling vertically, tiling horizontally, and cascading windows.

Here's a video: