Linux auto tiling manager with hot corner support for Openbox, Fluxbox, IceWM, Xfwm, KWin, Marco, Muffin, Mutter and other EWMH compliant window managers using the X11 window system. Therefore, this project provides dynamic tiling for XFCE, LXDE, LXQt, KDE and GNOME (Mate, Deepin, Cinnamon, Budgie) based desktop environments.
Simply keep your current window manager and install cortile on top of it.
Once enabled, the tiling manager will handle resizing and positioning of existing and new windows.
Support for keyboard and mouse events sets cortile apart from other tiling solutions. The go implementation ensures a fast and responsive system, where multiple layouts, keyboard shortcuts, drag & drop and hot corner events simplify and speed up your daily work.
Manually download
/extract
the latest binary file from releases or use wget
/tar
:
wget -qO- $(wget -qO- https://api.github.com/repos/leukipp/cortile/releases/latest | \
jq -r '.assets[] | select(.name | contains ("linux_amd64.tar.gz")) | .browser_download_url') | \
tar -xvz
Run the binary file and cortile will automatically tile until you stop it:
./cortile
Another installation method can be found in the development section. The latest official release is published on GitHub. Versions distributed via package managers are community supported and may be outdated.
To enable auto tiling on startup, you can run cortile as a service after the graphical user interface has been loaded.
A template to run cortile as a systemd service is provided in the services folder.
You may have to adjust the filepath/symlink under ExecStart
and enable the user service:
# copy systemd service file
cp cortile.service ~/.config/systemd/user/
# reload systemd configuration
systemctl --user daemon-reload
# enable systemd service
systemctl --user enable cortile.service
# start systemd service
systemctl --user start cortile.service
The layouts are based on the master-slave concept, where one side of the screen is considered to be the master area and the other side is considered to be the slave area:
vertical-right:
split the screen vertically, master area on the right.vertical-left:
split the screen vertically, master area on the left.horizontal-top:
split the screen horizontally, master area on the top.horizontal-bottom:
split the screen horizontally, master area on the bottom.maximized:
single window that fills the entire tiling area.fullscreen:
single window that fills the entire screen.The number of windows per side and the occupied space can be changed dynamically. Adjustments to window sizes are considered to be proportion changes of the underlying layout.
Windows placed on the master side are static and the layout will only change as long the space is not fully occupied. Once the master area is full, the slave area is used, where the layout changes dynamically based on available space and configuration settings.
The configuration file is located at ~/.config/cortile/config.toml
(or XDG_CONFIG_HOME
) and is created with default values during the first startup.
Additional information about individual entries can be found in the comments section of the config.toml file.
The default keyboard shortcuts are assigned as shown below.
If some of them are already in use by your system, update the default values in the [keys] section of the configuration file: |
Keys | Description |
---|---|---|
Ctrl+Shift+Home | Enable tiling on the current screen | |
Ctrl+Shift+End | Disable tiling on the current screen | |
Ctrl+Shift+R | Disable tiling and restore windows | |
Ctrl+Shift+T | Toggle between enable and disable | |
Ctrl+Shift+BackSpace | Reset layouts to default proportions | |
Ctrl+Shift+Next | Cycle through next layouts | |
Ctrl+Shift+Prior | Cycle through previous layouts | |
Ctrl+Shift+Left | Activate vertical-left layout | |
Ctrl+Shift+Right | Activate vertical-right layout | |
Ctrl+Shift+Up | Activate horizontal-top layout | |
Ctrl+Shift+Down | Activate horizontal-bottom layout | |
Ctrl+Shift+Space | Activate maximized layout | |
Ctrl+Shift+Return | Activate fullscreen layout | |
Ctrl+Shift+KP_5 | Make the active window master | |
Ctrl+Shift+KP_6 | Make the next window master | |
Ctrl+Shift+KP_4 | Make the previous window master | |
Ctrl+Shift+KP_Add | Increase number of master windows | |
Ctrl+Shift+KP_Subtract | Decrease number of master windows | |
Ctrl+Shift+Plus | Increase number of maximum slave windows | |
Ctrl+Shift+Minus | Decrease number of maximum slave windows | |
Ctrl+Shift+KP_3 | Increase proportion of master-slave area | |
Ctrl+Shift+KP_1 | Decrease proportion of master-slave area | |
Ctrl+Shift+KP_2 | Focus next window | |
Ctrl+Shift+KP_8 | Focus previous window |
Hot corner events are defined under the [corners] section and are triggered when the pointer enters one of the target areas: |
Corners | Description |
---|---|---|
Top-Left | Focus previous window | |
Top-Right | Make the active window master | |
Bottom-Right | Increase proportion of master-slave area | |
Bottom-Left | Decrease proportion of master-slave area |
Systray events are defined under the [systray] section and are triggered when the pointer keys are pressed while hovering the icon: |
Pointer | Description |
---|---|---|
Middle-Click | Toggle between enable and disable | |
Scroll-Up | Cycle through previous layouts | |
Scroll-Down | Cycle through next layouts | |
Scroll-Right | Increase proportion of master-slave area | |
Scroll-Left | Decrease proportion of master-slave area |
Common pointer shortcuts used in some environments:
External processes may communicate directly with cortile using unix domain sockets.
The sock parameter (-sock /tmp/cortile.sock
) defines a path for a socket file that can be used to exchange data between processes.
Internally however, two socket files are used.
One is for incoming (/tmp/cortile.sock.in
) and one for outgoing (/tmp/cortile.sock.out
) communication.
Example files for sending commands and receiving states can be found in the scripts folder.
You need go >= 1.20 to compile cortile.
Verify the installed go version:
go env | grep "GOPATH\|GOVERSION"
Start cortile in verbose mode:
$GOPATH/bin/cortile -v
Special settings:
edge_margin
property to account for additional spaces.
window_slaves_max
property to limit the number of windows.
window_slaves_max = 2
, all windows following the third window are stacked behind the two slaves.Hot corners:
tiling_enabled = false
if you prefer to utilize only the hot corner functionalities.[corners]
properties to execute any external command available on your system.
bottom_center = "firefox"
to open a web browser window.Systray:
tiling_icon
property to add any external command to the systray menu.
tiling_icon = [...,['firefox', 'Open Browser'],...]
to add a web browser entry.Cortile works best with Xfwm and Openbox window systems. However, it`s still possible that you may encounter problems during usage.
Windows:
edge_margin
property to adjust for additional margins.Systray:
[systray]
section, as some pointer events may not fire across different desktop environments.Debugging:
cortile -vv
, which provides additional debug outputs./tmp/cortile.log
.Based on zentile (Berin Larson) and pytyle3 (Andrew Gallant).
The main libraries used in this project are xgbutil, toml, systray, dbus, fsnotify and logrus.