To preface this, I’ve used Linux from the CLI for the better part of 15 years. I’m a software engineer and my personal projects are almost always something that runs in a Linux VM or a Docker container somewhere, but I’ve always used a Mac to work on personal and professional projects. I have a Windows desktop that I use exclusively for gaming and my personal Macbook is finally giving out after about 10 years, so I’m trying out Linux Mint with Cinnamon on my desktop.

So far, it works shockingly well and I absolutely love being able to reach for a real Linux shell anytime I want, with no weird quirks from MacOS or WSL. The fact that Steam works at all on a Linux environment is still a little magical to me.

There are a couple things I really miss from MacOS and Rectangle is one of them. I’ve spent a couple hours searching and trying out various solutions, but none of them do the specific thing Rectangle did for me. You input something like ctrl+cmd+right and Rectangle fits your current window to the top right quadrant of your screen.

Before I dive into the weeds and make my own Cinnamon Spice, I figured I should just ask: is there an app/extension that functions like Rectangle for Linux? Here’s the things I can say do not work:

  • Muffin hotkeys: Muffin only supports moving tiles, not absolutely positioning them. You can kind of mimic Rectangle behavior, but only with multiple keystrokes to move the windows around on the grid.
  • gTile: This is a Cinnamon Spice that I’m pretty sure has the bones of what I want in it, but the UI is the opposite of what I want.
  • gSnap: Very similar to gTile, but for Gnome. The UI for it is actually quite a bit worse, IMO; you are expected to use a mouse to drag windows.
  • zentile: On top of this only working for XFCE, it doesn’t actually let me position windows with a keystroke

To be super clear: Rectangle is explicitly not a tiling window manager. It lets you set hotkeys to move/resize windows, it does not reflow your entire screen to a grid. There are a dozen tiling tools/window manager out there I’ve found and I’ve begun to think the Linux community has a weird preoccupation with them. Like, they’re cool and all, but all I want is to move the current window to specific areas of my screen with a single keystroke. I don’t need every window squished into frame at once or some weird artsy layout.

  • thundermoose@lemmy.worldOP
    8·
    7 months ago

    Updated to be specific, I’m using Cinnamon. Muffin is the builtin tiling window manager for Cinnamon and it does exactly what you’re describing. The problem is that it moves tiles, it doesn’t absolutely position them. You have to keep moving tiles around to get them where you want them, Rectangle just has hotkeys to immediately place and resize to fit the active window for each quadrant that it supports:

    • ctrl+cmd+left: top left quadrant
    • ctrl+cmd+right: top left quadrant
    • shift+ctrl+cmd+left: bottom left quadrant
    • shift+ctrl+cmd+right: bottom left quadrant
    • alt+cmd+left: left half
    • alt+cmd+right: right half
    • alt+cmd+up: top half
    • alt+cmd+left: bottom half
    • alt+cmd+f: full screen

    It’s hard to express how natural that feels after using it for a bit, and I’m still using a Macbook for work so the muscle memory is not going away.

    • Andy@programming.dev
      201·
      7 months ago

      I’ll just second the suggestion that KDE Plasma is worth a try, as it’s very adaptable once you know what you want. You don’t need to install any addons for the functionality you describe, just open the Shortcuts settings, KWin category, and have at it.

      • thundermoose@lemmy.worldOP
        11·
        7 months ago

        I saw that and tried it pretty early on. That just moves the screen, it doesn’t fill the quadrant.

    • rollingflower@lemmy.kde.social
      81·
      7 months ago

      Do you HAVE to use Cinnamon? XD its a very slowly evolving Desktop Environment, Wayland is still experimental. I would recommend to try KDE.

      • Trent@lemmy.ml
        3·
        7 months ago

        It does. I use it all the time. I have various window cobtrol stuff bound to alt-keypad keys.

        • nmtake@lemm.ee
          2·
          7 months ago

          Thanks for the clarification. I switched from Xfce4 to GNOME many years ago because the former doesn’t support Wayland at that time, but I still miss the manual quarter tiling with the shortcut keys.

    • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nzM
      26·
      7 months ago

      I use Rectangle on macOS as well, and use Wayfire on Linux. Wayfire has a tiling plug-in that does exactly what Rectangle does.

      Mint and Cinnamon are quite outdated btw, I wouldn’t really recommend them unless you’ve got an old PC and you’re just a basic user.