By default Ubuntu has the option to quickly move your windows to half of the screen (super + right or super + left). This suits my needs for my 15 inch laptop.

But just now I attached my laptop to a very large screen. And it would be nice to make good use of all this screen estate. I wanted to be able to split the screen into four sections (top left, top right, bottom left and bottom right). And to easily change the windows to fit these sections.

gTile

Following this thread and this answer I discovered gTile. To quote their GitHub page:

• “gTile is a Gnome-shell extension that improves window tiling capabilities”.
• “gTile is used to moves/resize windows on a configurable grid scheme.”

Sounds like a good fit 🙂

Installing gTile

I already had Gnome-shell extensions installed: (sudo apt install gnome-shell-extensions) as well as the recommended Gnome tweak tool (sudo apt install gnome-tweak-tool).

I headed over to the official website of the Gnome-shell extensions and browsed to the gTile extension.

Their I was advised to install the browser extension, which I did for my active Firefox browser. That made it easy to finally install gTile.

Using gTile

gTile has a lot of options for configuration, but for me it works fine out of the box. I just wanted to know the keyboard shortcuts for moving the windows to the corners of the screen. This is possible by using super + alt + [keypad number].

For example: super + alt + keypad 1 moves my window to the bottom-left quarter of the screen. I found these shortcuts very intuitive.

Check out the keyboard shortcuts and more on the GitHub manual of gTile.