[FEATURE REQUEST] Ability to tile windows automatically

[zeealeid]

The "Window-Tiling" PowerToy

Here's an idea, add the ability to tile windows automatically. What I mean by that is when a window would open, it'll cover the whole screen but when another window would open, it'll cover the half of the screen automatically and the first app would also resize to the half of the screen. If the third window opens it'll open below the second window, resizing the second window to half vertically. And the new window would take place under the second window.

It has been done before in some Linux window managers like "i3". And a lot of people really appreciate the ability to do that.

Concept Shots

I've prepared some concept shots to show that:

In the image above, a single window is opened. When the user wants open another window, they would need to click the start button or hit the start key on the keyboard. The Start Menu would be replaced with Power Run. The user would be able to select the desired app by typing it's name and selecting one of the results by using the arrow keys. Or just type the name and hit enter

And when more than two apps are opened:

And when more than three apps are opened, the third app would be resized to half of it's size and the fourth window would appear in the empty space created by the third app.

There are better explanations of tiling window managers (than what I've done here) online

Conclusion

The window tiling feature is inspired by some window managers in Linux (like i3). I think it'll help with productivity stuff. I've posted these concept shots on Twitter and many people wanted this feature to be in PowerToys. Maybe integrate it in FancyZones by adding a toggle for this feature. What do you think? :)

[crutkas]

interesting idea. could do this with maybe a FZ tie in.

[JordanAnthonyKing]

I've worked on code that does something similar to this. Shouldn't be hard to implement.

@crutkas how do you mean by tie in? Are there plans to make FZ extensible?

[crutkas]

Why can’t it. We can add in what is needed, wonders of being in same project and OSS :)

[DavidGretzschel]

Right-clicking on the taskbar already allows for some kind of tiling.
Though I never figured out how it works exactly and I don't think it's very good.
It's also a bit similar to the "When I snap a window, show what I can snap next to it", that I always turn off within 2 minutes of a fresh install cause it feels kinda off.
[maybe I never gave it a chance though, as it felt intrusive]

This looks much cooler, though.

[csm10495]

I see this as a combo of FancyZones and Window Walker. I'd say use Ctrl+Win then put a '+' in front of an app name that you want to open. Then it opens and snaps all along... or something like that :)

[JordanAnthonyKing]

FancyZones sits in a weird place between a traditional tiling window manager and a regular floating window manager. I imagine the best way to implement such a feature without requiring FZ to have two distinct modes would be an option like Automatically add new windows that don't already belong to a zone to a new zone.

Really though FZ just needs an overhaul to its bindings and new features added like #1776, to make quickly configuring the active layout easy for the user.

[ascii-soup]

I would absolutely love this. It's one of a few things I desperately miss from i3/awesome.

It would be nice to be able to create a series of configurations ('views' maybe) that you can apply to individual monitors. A shortcut to change a monitor from using "View 1" to using "View 2" would be good.

A view could contain settings such as "manual window snap" or "automatic window tiling" as well as the list of zones that we have at the moment.

An example using my setup:

I would love to be able to have a 'static' pair of zones on my portrait monitor, a single horizontal split, so that I can have Outlook on top and Slack below. But on my main landscape monitor, I'm always chopping and changing applications, so it would be awesome to have a zoneset configured that took advantage of auto tiling, so that if I only have my IDE open, it is full screen, but as soon as I open a terminal, the screen has a vertical split at 70/30 and the terminal takes up the full RHS of the screen (the 30%). If I add another terminal window, it should split the 30% zone in half horizontally, just like in @zeealeid screenshots above.

Bindings to assign windows to a specific zone would be welcome, as well as the option to designate a zone as a "master" zone, which means it never gets auto-split.

I think I'm getting into a laundry-list of features for FZ now but seeing this issue made me realise that whilst FZ is so many miles ahead of the default Windows wm, there is still stuff that I really miss from tiling WMs I used for many years on Linux.

[Javiertis]

That idea seems like some kind of tiling window manager, like those that you can install in linux.
It would be interesting, tbh.

[aaronmhargrove]

This would be SUPER helpful for me. Since windows doesn't support individual virtual desktops per monitor I always find myself trying to cram more onto each screen when I'm doing development stuff on Windows. The tiling aspect would also be extremely helpful with resizing, so they could all stay snapped together and resize at the same time.

[enricogior]

@JordanAnthonyKing

Are there plans to make FZ extensible?

No we don't have any plan to make it extensible. It would require to redesign and re-implement it from scratch, an overwhelming task if you ask me.
Also, at first glance I don't see a clean architecture to make it extensible.
The flow/auto-tile feature won't fit with the FancyZones architecture, and I doubt it would make sense to try to have both active at the same time.
In my opinion, it would make more sense to implement the flow/auto-tile as a separate module and as an alternative to FancyZones.