WinTile For GNOME Shell: Windows 10 Like Quarter Tiling (Snapping) With Super/Win + Arrow Keys Or Mouse

If you like the Microsoft Windows 10 tiling style, you can easily get your GNOME Shell desktop to support it with the help of an extension called WinTile.

The extension brings quarter tiling functionality to GNOME Shell, using the Super/Win + Arrow keys or using the mouse (with previews and snapping when dragging the windows to the edges).

Maximizing single windows and maximizing to the side snap modes also work next to quarter tiling, both using the keyboard (Super/Win + Up to maximize a window, and Super/Win + Left or Right arrow to maximize a window to the left or right, taking 50% of the screen) and mouse. Do note that single window maximizing and maximizing to the left/right (edge tiling) are already present in the standard GNOME Shell, so there's no need to install anything if that's all you want.

WineTile requires GNOME Shell 3.28, 3.30, 3.32 or 3.34 (so it should work with Debian 10 Buster and newer, Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver and newer, Fedora 30 and newer, etc.) and it's compatible with both X11 and Wayland sessions.

The extension preferences offer the ability to tweak the extension behavior. If you have a wide / ultrawide monitor, you can increase the number of tile columns from 2 to 3 or 4. Depending on whether you want to have GNOME animations when maximizing windows or not, there's an option you can use to toggle true maximizing of windows. There's also an option to enable or disable showing previews and snapping when dragging windows to the edges.

Related: Material Shell Is A New Tiling Shell For Gnome (Beta)

The latest version of "WinTile: Windows 10 window tiling for GNOME", released yesterday, brings the ability to configure when the window tile preview is shown, with the help of 2 new options that allow setting the delay before triggering the tile preview display, and setting the distance from the edge of the screen before showing a preview.

The extension currently lacks the ability to change the keys used for window tiling / snapping, as well as an option to set the gaps between tiled windows. There's also no option snap windows to the top and bottom halfs of the screens either. Other than that, the extension does what it's supposed to with no issues - I've tested it on Ubuntu 19.10 and Fedora 31 (both are using GNOME Shell 3.34).

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Download WinTile: Windows 10 window tiling for GNOME

The install button above will take you to the WinTile extensions.gnome.org page from where you can install it by clicking the OFF switch to the right-hand side of the extension name to set it ON. Follow the GNOME Shell browser integration instructions to set up installing GNOME Shell extensions using a web browser if you haven't already, or install the extension using GNOME Software if it supports it.

The latest version of the extension (v5), which adds 2 new options I already mentioned, is not yet available on the GNOME Shell extensions website. Until it's reviewed and approved, you can install it manually by grabbing the wintile@nowsci.com.zip archive from the "WinTile: Windows 10 window tiling for GNOME" extension releases page. Install this by extracting the archive and moving the wintile@nowsci.com folder to ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/.