Assigning a keyboard shortcut to "snap window to left/right half of the screen"

[geoffmen]

I want tu assign Super+Left to "snap window to left half of the screen", but I don't see such an option in the keyboard shortcuts. Is there a way I could create a custom shortcut using a Command? I've looked on the net but haven't found anything...

[WBryan]

One could imagine (as I have) writing a shell script to do this, then attach a keyboard shortcut to it...

wmctrl can do some pretty cool stuff from the commandline... you just need additional window information to do this from a keyboard shortcut.

Here's one I wrote to toggle the maximize vertical and horizontal to fix a problem with compiz...
Requires:
xwininfo (xorg-X11-utils)
xdotool
wmctrl

#!/bin/bash
#
# Hack to get the desired toggle maximize vert/horiz effect in compiz
#

TYPE=$1

# Get the active window id
WINID=`xdotool getactivewindow`

# Get the upper left X (absolute)
ULX=`xwininfo -id $WINID | grep "Absolute upper-left X" | sed 's/Absolute upper-left X: //'`
MAXVERT=`xwininfo -id $WINID -wm | grep "Maximized Vert"`
MAXHORZ=`xwininfo -id $WINID -wm | grep "Maximized Horz"`

ULX=`echo $ULX | sed -e 's/^[ \t]*//'`
MAXVERT=`echo $MAXVERT | sed -e 's/^[ \t]*//'`
MAXHORZ=`echo $MAXHORZ | sed -e 's/^[ \t]*//'`

# First toggle what we want
case "$TYPE" in
    vert)
        wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -b toggle,maximized_vert
        ;;
    horz)
        wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -b toggle,maximized_horz
        ;;
esac


# Now move it back, if it needs to be moved back
if [ -z "$MAXVERT" ]; then
# Sleep a little... because it takes time for the window to move
    usleep 50000
    wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -e 0,${ULX},-1,-1,-1
fi

[geoffmen]

Thanks for the info. I created a simple script in ~/snapLeft.sh that does the trick:

WINID=`xdotool getactivewindow`
wmctrl -i -r $WINID -e 0,1,22,640,800

For the left half, and slightly different coordinates for the right half.
(Do you know what gravity is?)

However, I don't know how to run the script using the keyboard shortcut. In System Settings / Keyboard / Shortcuts / Custom Shortcuts I created one and I wrote "~/snapLeft.sh" but it fails to execute it when I do the keyboard combination. How can I assign the kb shortcut to the script?

[WBryan]

I dont normally use Gnome 3... but followed what you did, and got an window popup saying there was an error with executing that script.

I replaced the

~/snapLeft.sh

with

/home/username/snapLeft.sh

and it began working as prescribed..

Try using the absolute pathname, instead of using the tilda (~).