Grout
A manual window tiling script for Linux written in Python, heavily inspired by gtile.
(You can also check out the same video in higher quality on YouTube here.)
What is Grout?
Grout is a Python script to manually tile windows for Linux. The goal is to allow you to have the fun of clean tiling window managers like bspwm or i3, without forcing you to switch distros or window managers permanently. It's not perfect, but it works alright nonetheless.
Ideally, at some point I'd like to make it a daemon so it could, say, monitor your computer for new windows and automatically slot them into dynamic tiling layouts, but for now, this is fine.
Why Grout?
Existential!
I wanted some of the efficiency (and cool factor) of a tiling window manager. However, I didn't want to install another window manager, as I like the way my distro (Solus) looks and how user-friendly it is.
So, I looked around to see if I could find a tool that did tiling within an existing windowing manager, and found GTile. While it was a great start, there were some things that were lacking. And so, here is Grout.
No, why is it named Grout?
Oh.
Well, y'know. Because...
It's for tiles.
Features?
- Symmetrical / non-symmetrical tiling layouts
- Works with one desktop / multiple screens
- Each screen can have its own tiling layout
- Easy to extend with your own custom tiling layouts
- Should be friendly to a variety of distros and window managers
- At least tries to work with GTK apps
- ... That's it, haha.
Requirements?
Grout has a few requirements:
- Python 3
- xrandr
- xprop
- xdotool
For Solus, you can just run:
sudo eopkg it xrandr xprop xdotool
From there, just clone or download this repo and stick it somewhere, then run grout from there. You can also put grout and config.py somewhere in your PATH and launch it from wherever. NOTE: If you update Grout, you should probably replace the config file as well as the script itself, and transfer any changes you've made to the new file.
How do I use Grout?
To use Grout, just run:
grout [number]
The number corresponds to one of the tiles in a tiling layout selected in the configuration file (config.py). A variety of tiling layouts are provided, but you can make your own and slot it into the config file very easily.
Here's an example of a tiling layout:
"squares":[
[1, 2, 2],
[1, 2, 2],
[4, 3, 3],
],
The layout's name is "squares", and it's selected by setting currentLayout in config.py to contain the word "squares". With the above layout selected, grout 1 will set the currently selected window to the top-left corner of the screen, with 33% width and 66% height - in other words, where the 1's are in the layout. grout 2 will set it to 66% width and 66% height, hugging the top-right corner, which is where the 2s are, and so on.
Once you've got that down, you just map keyboard shortcuts to run Grout with each number in your OS's global keyboard shortcuts section. (Each provided tiling layout uses a maximum of 5 tiles, numbered 1 - 5.) After that, you just press the key combos to tile windows according to your selected layout.
Check config.py for more information / options to customize how Grout works; note that if you mess something up and want to start fresh, Grout will automatically make a backup copy of the config.py file when first run (named, conveniently enough, config_backup.py).
Thanks!
You're welcome!
If you want to thank me further, please feel free to throw me a bone by buying a copy of my indie dev project planning software, MasterPlan, here, hyuk hyuk hyuk. Note that the source for MasterPlan is also available here on GitHub.
Thanks to grocid for making GTile, as well~!