Window snapping in MATE

[AnalBeard]

I'm currently running Mint with Cinnamon but I'm thinking of moving to MATE (on Ubuntu), and I'm more or less sold apart from one deal breaker - window snapping with keyboard shortcuts.

I spend the majority of my day working over SSH, and my most-used functionality in Cinnamon is to snap windows with win+<arrow>. I can enable snapping in MATE, but I can't see a way of using shortcuts to control it - is this possible?

[tgalati4]

What version of MATE are you using? I couldn't find the snapping windows option. Where did you activate it?

If you don't see a Snap-to-Windows action in the Keyboard Shortcuts preferences, then there is no way to assign a a keycode to it.

[AnalBeard]

What version of MATE are you using? I couldn't find the snapping windows option. Where did you activate it?

If you don't see a Snap-to-Windows action in the Keyboard Shortcuts preferences, then there is no way to assign a a keycode to it.

1.8 on both Ubuntu and Mint - http://www.mate-desktop.org/blog/2014-03-04-mate-1-8-released/

Looks like I need to do more digging, but I'm fairly sure there was nothing in the shortcut prefs :(

[tgalati4]

You are correct. Snapping windows is in Menu->Preferences->Windows. And yes, I can see that it is handy on a wide-screen monitor and opening a lot of bash terminals. I don't see a shortcut action to assign a keystroke to. So that would be a request to the MATE (marco window manager) developers for a future release point release (perhaps 1.8.2).

How do you use the shortcut key? How is it useful? Do you use it to move an existing window?

A workaround is to assign the meta+<arrow> keys to scripts that perform the same functions.

[vasa1]

Is MATE compatible with something window managers like Openbox (or Fluxbox)? Window snap via the keyboard is built into these WMs.

I got the impression that Metacity (from which marco is derived) is somewhat limited in this respect.

[tgalati4]

I have marco but not metacity on my system. So I presume that it is a fork that is specific to MATE. According the to manual page:


DESCRIPTION
This manual page documents briefly marco.

marco is a minimal X window manager aimed at nontechnical users and is designed to integrate well with the MATE desktop. marco lacks some fea‐
tures that may be expected by traditional UNIX or other technical users; these users may want to investigate other available window managers for
use with MATE or standalone.

[vasa1]

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MATE#Use_a_different_window_manager_with_MATE