21

One thing I find missing in Kwin is the ability to quickly and easily arrange open windows so that I can see more than one at a time. Sometimes I want to use both Konqueror and Firefox simultaneously, or easily drag and drop a file from Dolphin into another instance of Dolphin or Konqueror without switching windows and resizing them manually so I can see everything I want to.

If this already exists in Kwin or other KDE software, please let me know!

If it doesn't, I propose an idea. I'm not a developer so I don't know if this could even be implemented and I'm not able to do a pretty mockup so this is just the idea. I'm willing to help in it's implementation however I can.

I just wish I had the ability to quickly change the arrangement and layout of my windows. Maybe it could be implemented as a desktop effect - you can assign both a shortcut key and a screen edge to activate.
There are pre-defined templates for the window layouts that can be selected and managed via System Settings, somewhere in Window Behavior. I think my default would be to have my main (selected) window fill the left side of a widescreen display, with two smaller but equal sized horizontally laid windows stacked on the right half side.

Maybe someone can point me to something that will already do something similar to this, or use this as inspiration for something better!

I like the idea of the brainstorming section. I read the FAQ, and hope this meets the guidelines. This is my first post in here.

Thanks!

Added [tag] to idea title.

An interesting idea, but somewhat vague on the details. I have an idea about how to implement it. Perhaps if you do something like a meta(win)+drag on the window, it will try to fit the window into the existing screen size. So if you meta+drag a window to the border of an existing maximized window, the window will resize so it is half the original size and the other window takes up the other half. You can do this repeatedly, with the window whose border you dropped the new window on will move that border to resize the window to half its current size, putting the new window in that space. If you meta+drag on the border of such windows, you move both borders in the same way, so that as one window shrinks the other grows by the same amount, keeping the entire screen filled. This would not interfere with normal window management, but would allow you to quickly set up complicated window layouts without much difficulty.

As an example, say you start off with one maximized window. Then you bring a single other window to the front. You meta+drag that window to one of the screen edges, and then drop it. The existing maximized window shrinks to half the screen size, and the window you just dropped takes up the other half (maximized along the edge of the screen you dropped it on). As an example, lets say we dropped it along the left edge. It is now takes up the whole left half of the screen, with the original window in the right half. If you meta+drag on the border between the two windows, it resizes both windows so that together they always take up the whole screen. So lets say you meta+dragging to the left on the border between them, allowing you to simultaneously resize the windows so the left window takes up 1/3 of the width of the screen and the right window takes up 2/3. Next, you bring a second window to the front. You meta+drag that window, and drop it along the bottom edge of the left window. The left window resizes so it has the same width, but now has 1/2 the height (in the top half of the space it originally had). The new window takes up the bottom half of the same space, while the right window is unaffacted. You do the same thing again, and now there are three windows on the right that all take up 1/3 the height of the screen. So you know have 4 windows, one on the right that is as tall as the screen and 2/3 the width. The other three are 1/3 the width and 1/3 the height of the screen, and are spaced evenly along the left edge. Now you just drag away the right window (no meta), and the other three windows automatically resize to have the same height they had before but the whole width the of the screen.