Window tiling

KDE Plasma 5.27

KDE Plasma 5.27 is a significant milestone, not just because it contains so many new features and fixes, but because it's the final release before the migration to Qt 6 and Plasma 6. As with several major open source projects, including Firefox, Krita, and Blender, a rapid cadence makes it difficult to track anything but major new features, and that's certainly the case with Plasma 5.27. Nestled alongside the new Discover features and the Guided setup is "native window tiling." This is something we've wanted to see for years, and we've covered an almost endless supply of scripts and add-ons that bring native-like tiling to Plasma. Some have been more successful than others, with the austere kwin-tiling being the tool to beat thanks to its powerful i3 keyboard shortcuts. The KDE team, however, have supplanted kwin-tiling with their first tentative steps into tiling, while at the same time massively broadening its appeal to the many of us who can't remember a single keyboard shortcut.

The new tiling feature is difficult to find, but it's triggered by enabling the Tiling Editor in the Desktop Effects pane. With this done, you can now press Meta+T (by default) to open the editor and create some zones for your windows to lock into. The editor is beautifully designed, showing a small pop-up that prompts you to split an area horizontally, vertically, or to enable floating windows. An area can be further subdivided into as many horizontal and vertical splits as you need, and area boundaries can be dragged into whatever column or row for any size you need. You can also load a predefined layout. Pressing the shortcut again will return you to the desktop, and if you press Shift when dragging a window, the tiles you created are highlighted. Releasing a window into one of these will lock it in place, but you can still resize tiles and borders even when the screen is full, and all windows in the same row or column will also resize. The only features missing are keyboard controls and the ability to save a new layout, but we're sure these will come with an update.

Project Website

https://kde.org/et/announcements/plasma/5/5.27.0/

There are no keyboard shortcuts yet for native Plasma tiling, but Alt+dragging a window makes it almost as intuitive when relocating windows.

3D design