Fancy Tiles is a Cinnamon Extension that snaps your windows to regions in a very flexible layout. This layout does not have to be a typical grid where horizontal and vertical lines span the screen and columns and rows do not have to be evenly distributed. This is inspired by the way Fancy Zones work in Windows.
Download the code in this repository and place it in the directory ~/.local/share/cinnamon/extensions/fancytiles@basgeertsema . Or use the one-liner below to download and install directly.
mkdir ~/.local/share/cinnamon/extensions/fancytiles@basgeertsema && (curl -s -L https://github.com/BasGeertsema/fancytiles/archive/refs/heads/main.tar.gz | tar xvz -C ~/.local/share/cinnamon/extensions/fancytiles@basgeertsema --strip-components=1)Open Cinnamon Extensions, click on the Fancy Tiles extension and click the '+' button to enable Fancy Tiles.
After enabling the extension, press <SUPER>+G to open the layout editor. It will start with a 2x2 grid layout. Click and drag the dividers (the lines between regions) to resize the regions. If you want to split a region, press <SHIFT> or <CTRL> while hovering over the region to split the region horizontally or vertically. Use the right mouse button to remove dividers. Use <Page Up> and <Page Down> to increase or decrease the spacing between the regions.
After you have crafted your desired layout, exit the editor using <SUPER>+G or <ESC>.
Now, start dragging a window and simultaneously hold the <CTRL> key. The layout will become visible. Hover your mouse over the region you want the window to snap to and release the mouse button. The window will now be snapped into place. When the mouse hovers over the border between two regions, these regions are merged into a single region into which the window will snap.
If you want to make the snapping region even larger you can hold the <ALT> key and hover over adjacent regions to merge them all into a single large snapping region.
There are 8 slots to hold layout presets. Presets 4-8 are read only system presets and 1-4 are your user presets. When the layout editor is opened, press <SPACE> to view the presets, and click the preset you want to load. Similarly, press the <ALT> key to open the save preset dialog and select one of the four user slots that you want to save the current layout to.
Tip: you can quickly load presets by opening the layout editor and immediately press the slot number of your desired preset (1-8).
