Is there a lightweight way to snap windows in Lubuntu?

Question

I'm looking for a lightweight way to snap windows in Lubuntu. It's possible to install compiz, but doing so will make the system far less lightweight. Are there any alternatives or workarounds?

Answer 1

Using a lightweight window manager

You could use the lightweight compositing manager used by XFCE called xfwm4

This will give you basic windows snap.

N.B. if you dont like the default "change workspace when dragging a window off the screen" capability then untick the very last option shown in the picture.

Getting Tiling to work

However - if you want the "tiling-snap" of compiz you will need to get your coding-hands dirty because this is work-in-progress.

According to this article - there is a potential patch available to enable windows tiling (aka windows snap) for the xfwm4 compositing manager.

Through the following Q&A I have packaged this tiling patch into my PPA - instructions for installation can be found in the linked answer.

There is a great you-tube video showing this in action.

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How to use xfwm4 in lubuntu/lxde

To use xfwm4 as your compositing manager instead of OpenBox.

In Desktop Settings - Advanced options change the window manager to xfwm4

Now in terminal:

cd ~/.config/lxsession
mkdir Lubuntu
cp LXDE/* Lubuntu/

Install the compositing manager:

sudo apt-get install xfwm4-themes

Logout and login for the xfwm4 compositing manager to take effect.

Change the style via xfwm4-settings

Answer 2

Super + arrow

Super + ← and Super + → split the screen horizontally.

Super + ↑ and Super + ↓ split it vertically.

Answer 3

I personally use quicktile.

It allows you to snap windows in different regions of your screen based on keyboard inputs (e.g. Ctrl+Alt+1 to get the window to the top-left corner). It can be run as daemon on any X11-based desktop and only requires python as a dependency.

As far as I can tel, it does not have a drag-and-snap function, but your question did not seem restricted to mouse-only behaviour.

Answer 4

Maybe you check out OpenSnap.

Answer 5

This thread on crunchbang forum talks about getting aero-snap feature by tweaking openbox. If you want to look into tile, cascade and expose like feature in lightweight environment you may look into this. Although posted in xfce forum it may be useful for other windowmanagers as it uses xwininfo, wmctrl and xdotool. so you need to install x11-utils, xdotool and wmctrl and bind some keyboard action to the given script. I have been using it in xfce and it works OK for me. If you need compositing as well, try cairo-compmgr, which will give you transparency, expose like functionality and many others without replacing your window manager. In order to install:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:shnatsel/cairo-compmg
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cairo-compmgr

And just start it OR add to your startup script.