How to move windows around

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How to move windows around

Post by bigpup »

How to move windows around on the desktop.

Alt button hold.
Left mouse button click on window and hold.
Move mouse around.

Note:
Placement of mouse pointer is important.
The location of the pointer, is the limit of movement past edge of screen.
The window will move the full range of the mouse pointer on screen.
Just move, to different location of mouse pointer, to change movement amount with window.

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Re: How to move windows around

Post by Feek »

after 1 year of using Puppy Linux and Fatdog

I happened to find that when you hover the cursor over the bar of the window, you can minimize the application with the mouse wheel. The bar remains on the desktop and the application can be maximized again the same way at any time.

interesting feature

Bigpup, thanks for all these short helpful instructions and tips.

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Re: How to move windows around

Post by rockedge »

you can minimize the application with the mouse wheel

This feature is called "Shade" if one right clicks on the top bar of the window for the menu it's there with "Maximize" and the others.
I use it all the time and activate it also with the mouse wheel while hovering on the top bar.

user1111

Re: How to move windows around

Post by user1111 »

I mostly use a laptop, so key controls are useful. I dual boot Fatdog and OpenBSD (concurrently available, as I use kvm/qemu). In OpenBSD I use cwm as the window manager - basically starts with a blank screen, no window titles, no tray ..etc. Basic controls are
ctrl-alt-return for a terminal
alt-? for a exec window (where you type the first few characters of a program and it presents a list of matches that you can arrow to and press enter to launch)
ctrl-alt-m to maximise toggle a window
ctrl-alt-x to close a window
alt-tab to step between windows (or alt / to see a list of windows that the arrow keys and enter can select)

Awkward at first, soon becomes automatic/second-nature. Accordingly I set the likes of jwm to have similar key bindings, for instance within .jwmrc having the likes of

...
<Key mask="CA" key="Return">exec:xterm</Key>
<Key mask="CA" key="x">close</Key>
... etc.

(or exec:urxvt instead of xterm according to your preferred terminal emulator)

Moving windows is the same, alt and left mouse drag. Resizing windows is alt and middle mouse drag. There are also hjkl key options to resize the window.

Mostly I maximise windows and alt-tab between them. Seamonkey browser is nice as its easy to also shade/hide the Menu, url and bookmarks bars i.e. the full screen real-estate is used for actual browser content, no bars, no window titles, no tray, which might otherwise collectively consume perhaps a third of the vertical screen space.

If you click the leftmost icon in a jwm window title bar, typically it will show a range of options that can be applied. In my default jwmrc I have alt-F2 set to show that menu (alt-F1 shows the main systems menu), where again you can use the arrow keys to move to a selection.

Basically you can configure things to be accommodating to keyboard heavy usage, or stick with mouse heavy type usage for which jwm/rox (drag/drop based) is good. Similarly some like to have multiple visible windows and zoom/unzoom individual windows into 'focus' whilst others such as myself prefer switching between maximised windows. All a question of preference and configuring according to those preferences. I guess I like the full screened choice/approach as typically I have one terminal window, one Fatdog window and one OpenBSD window to 'flip' between; Where in the terminal window that is ssh into a server where tmux runs - and has multiple tabs (windows) to select from (irc, mutt email ...etc.); And the OpenBSD window is primarily just a browser - that has multiple tabs, and another box (vnc into a server that's connected to the TV). I can also vnc into the TV/server from my phone (as can others i.e. to share the same display/desktop); And where the Fatdog window has the usual tray/jwm like (OpenBox) window decorations/controls, so I can see for instance the battery/network/volume ...etc. type tray icons/controls.

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Re: How to move windows around

Post by rjey »

Hello, Is it possible to disable this function?
I need to use alt+lmb in webapp and instead of the expected result in webapp my browser moves...

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Re: How to move windows around

Post by gychang »

Insert this into ~/.jwm/jwmrc-personal: <Key mask="CS" key="m">move</Key> then can use Ctrl-Shift+m key, then arrow keys to move a window.

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Re: How to move windows around

Post by MochiMoppel »

rjey wrote: Fri Nov 03, 2023 5:27 pm

Hello, Is it possible to disable this function?
I need to use alt+lmb in webapp and instead of the expected result in webapp my browser moves...

@rjey
Assuming that you use JWM and assuming further that the JWM version is v2.3.7 or newer you can change this behavior.
In ~/.jwm/jwmrc-personal add or change the line
<MoveMode mask="ACS">opaque</MoveMode>
When done run jwm -restart in a console window.
This will let windows move when dragged while pressing Alt+Ctrl+Shift keys instead of just Alt key. The ability to move a window by dragging the title bar with the left mouse button alone is not affected.
Note that this will also change the ability to resize a window by holding Alt key and dragging with right mouse button. You would now need Alt+Ctrl+Shift.

To disable mouse bindings for the MoveMode completely may not be possible. All my attempts with different mask settings resulted in some unwanted side effects.

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