Ubuntu 23.10, codenamed Mantic Minotaur, will ship with the Tiling Assistant extension that will enable quarter tiling, according to OMG! Ubuntu. The ability to snap windows side-by-side jumped onto the scene with Windows 7 and the feature was also picked up by other operating systems like Ubuntu.
With the new extension, however, Ubuntu users will be able to snap windows to each of the four corners to enable quarter tiling. There will also be an option to drag windows to the top and bottom of the screen to snap windows horizontally rather than vertically. If you drag the window to the top, you have to hold it for it to split in half.
Ubuntu 23.10 users will be able to control advanced snapping features from Snapping > Ubuntu Desktop. From there, users can choose whether the tiling assistant is enabled, disable the tiling popup, and toggle tiling groups.
The developers that work on Ubuntu at Canonical have said that they plan to work with the GNOME project developers to bake this advanced tiling directly into the desktop environment. GNOME is the most popular desktop environment on Linux and this functionality being built in would benefit many users and provide a huge productivity boost.
One of the features you have with the existing vertical snapping is the ability to resize the two windows at once from the middle. With the quadrant tiling, you’ll still be able to resize windows and the others will dynamically adjust.
To be clear, you can have a variety of layouts with quadrant tiling. You can have one program taking up the entire left side of your screen and then two windows on the right, two side-by-side, or four quartered tiles - the possibilities are not endless but there are quite a lot of them.
If you are on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and want to try out this extension, you can do by installing the Extensions Manager application from Ubuntu Software and then searching for the Tiling Assistant by Leleat extension - future Ubuntu versions will have it baked in though.
Source: OMG! Ubuntu
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