derick rethans
› XFCE and moving windows around with the keyboard
XFCE and moving windows around with the keyboard
During a recent apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade I suddenly found myself with the horrors that are Gnome 3 and the Gnome shell, and of course, at the least opportune moment when I was actually planning on heading into an office (more about that later). I've always been a big Sawfish fan, and was annoyed when Gnome replaced that with Metacity, but I always managed to get Sawfish back up again. No more luck now, and without a Debian package maintainer I decided to try out XFCE.
I found XFCE to be as easy to use with the keyboard as Sawfish but with one big missing issue: I couldn't change the size and position of windows at the keyboard anymore. I hardly use a mouse as it hurts too much, and always relied on those keyboard shortcuts to position my windows so I was quite a bit at a loss. After some searching I ran into a post on nabble that contained a script that almost did what I want. It uses a bunch of standard X tools (xprop and xwininfo) to find some information about the active window and its properties. Then depending on some parameters it would use wmctrl to move and/or resize the window. For example: ./bin/window-geometry-control.sh -m left would move the window 1 pixel to the left.
That's all good, but way too slow. I basically just want to bump my windows to the top, right, bottom and left sides of my screen. So besides the simple move and resize, I added what Sawfish originally also had: move left/right/top and bottom; and well as resize-to left/right/top and bottom. Now with the command ./bin/window-geometry-control -b left I can move the active window all the way to the left, and with ./bin/window-geometry-control -s bottom I can resize my window from its current position all the way to the bottom of the screen. To each of the four directions and two methods I assigned keyboard shortcuts in xfce4-settings-manager, Keyboard, Application Shortcuts.
The screenshot above shows those assigned keyboard shortcuts. I've put the modified script on github. As you can see I hardcoded the width and height of my own screen in it. Feel free to make this dynamic and send a pull request.
