KDE: Keyboard shortcuts for placing applications on screen

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Even though better support for tiling is coming, you can kind of do tiling in KDE – I’ll throw one app in the left half of the screen and another in the right half with the meta-right/left arrow combinations. With 3 screens, this gives me 6 slots for apps.

The meta-left/right is also useful for moving apps between screens.

Meta-PgUp can be used to change an app to full screen.

A demo:

I also set up several shortcuts:

  • Meta-enter: start new terminal
  • Meta-space: start/show workflowy

Overall, I prefer to not customize KDE a lot as it is more work to set up on new systems. Fortunately with KDE, the defaults are really good and provide most of what I need.

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I just learned you can use Meta+two arrow keys to throw an application into 1/4 of the screen. KDE makes a pretty good tiling window manager …

Example:

Screenshot_20230411_081650
Screenshot_20230411_0816501920×1080 122 KB

One wrinkle I noticed is that this only works in the monitor you started the application – otherwise it will move the application to the monitor where you started the application.

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yeah, I use mouse to pull a window to a corned and it aligns to 1/4 of screen. pulling to middle’ish makes into half

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Thanks for the mouse tip – I have never done that before. It appears if you mouse it to another screen and dock it, then the meta+two-arrows will then dock it in that screen instead of the original – very nice!

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