 Hello and welcome to yet another episode of KD is actually pretty friendly to tiling, whatever you think tiling is actually. So I really wanted to make a quick video to showcase how much you can use tiling into KD Plasma. Now there are various different levels of tiling, like there's people who go to full tiling window managers like i3 or Osom. That's a pretty nice way to do to do tiling in my opinion and I've never actually used them but I do see their point and I would even consider using them if I wasn't so you know a big fan of KD Plasma after all. But it's not just that. Take PopOS as an example they do have these tiling extensions we could extension singular we could call it that you can enable and disable that directly works inside of matter if I understand that correctly and we do have something like that for KD Plasma too and finally KD Plasma is I think one of the very few desktops if not the only desktop that is by default out of the box a floating desktop environment but it has now built-in tiling support. So let's go through all of these things so that we have a nice showcase of all the tiling features and the first thing is yes I've talked about i3 and osom did you know that you can actually use them especially i3 I don't know that much about osom you can use them with KD Plasma and yes the idea of a tiling window manager is usually to be minimalistic and such but you know if you're learning i3 and you're not really maybe to switch out of KD Plasma because you know it so well and it's a friendly environment anything you can still use i3 whilst using plasma I've actually done this one time these are the instructions on how to do it when I tried to it worked but again I never used i3 which means that I'm not exactly sure how it worked so I just could see that it boot and I had my KD Plasma panel and that was about it so if you're interested in how to use like another window manager in Plasma you can just throw kwin out of the window and everything should still work nicely you just have to follow these instructions that you can find on this nice link here all of this is provided without any guarantee from me that it works because I just tried it a lot of time ago but back then it worked so yeah you can use it go ahead secondly there is adding some tiling extension to kwin which is the default window manager for KD Plasma and I've actually done that I've actually spent years using a tiling window manager for KD Plasma because I liked it so much I was very big a very big fan of tiling but that kind of tiling that it's built into floating window manager for some reason I just liked it so how do you do that now there are a couple of different ways let me pick the first one one thing you can do is to open system settings then you can go into workspace behavior sorry window management kwin scripts and underneath my head there is this get new scripts button which will open this pop up and if you go through all the scripts there's a lot of things that are not related to tiling that you might find useful and a lot of things that are related to tiling like this case zones is already a bit related but we'll get to fancy zones later but we also get a lot of full tiling as an example I think I showcased exquisite in the past a very nice script but there's more like window gaps I've previously used for a while cronkite was quite famous but it got a bit it's not developed anymore I think and then I think I used though back then I used one of the older tiling which was just called tiling extensions so you could do it just that out of the box and that's already a lot of tiling possibilities that you can explore but there's another project that I really want to showcase which is bismuth so bismuth is still an extension but it builds tiling inside of kwin in a much prettier way I think compared to other project and first of all it does that by actually adding a new section to the system settings so you don't have that section of before you have a brand new section which is just called window tiling and you got all the options there funny enough I do have this installed but on the other computer so I don't have it here with me right now but it does work and it does work nicely we can see a couple of videos on how it's showcased by the website itself and you know it's tiling it has window shortcuts and this kind of things you can select some patterns to display windows it's a super interesting project so even if you're not 100% 3d to switch to a full window tiling manager then just go with this thirdly I mentioned the fact that now kd has tiling built into kwin itself and I've done a video entirely about that but now it actually landed so yay so let's quickly go through what's new and some new things that I didn't know about in the last video and what's the future for tiling in kd plasma so this is taken from Ned Graham's blog of pointys stick which you should all follow if you don't I think you do and he talks about the fact that the tiling features landed if you want to explore a bit more the thoughts behind them there's also the blog from Marco Martin the developer who actually implemented this and how it works is basically that you have this new screen that you can trigger with a shortcut which looks like this and you have the possibility to customize some zones of the areas of your screen you can split them horizontally vertically you can resize them you can even make some areas floating this kind of things and when you're done you get out of the screen that screen where you just set the general layout of that screen and then just by drag and dropping a window whilst holding the shift key the window will always automatically tile inside that area so it's very similar to the idea of fancy zones in windows I think it's called you also get some areas built in via this nice pop-up and you can customize how much margin you want between the windows and also the window and the screen so a nice implementation it also has a very nice thing for all users even if you're not into carry tiling so out of the box now you know that you have some shortcuts to tile a window to the left and to the right or even if you drag and drop the title title bar to the complete left or complete right if you do that it will tile left or right now if you have two windows tiled so that they cover the entire screen and you resize one of them previously you just resized that one and that would mean that it would either cover the other one or be too small now both windows actually resize that the same time because they're tiled together which is a super nice feature that I accidentally showcased in my last tiling video because I didn't know it was a feature and I just discovered it whilst filming nice and this is what we have currently for kd tiling so what is the future for tiling in k plasma well I think that this tiling feature that we've seen in built into kwin it's not like super full tiling with keyboard shortcuts and everything but that's no point that was not the idea however this new feature does expose an api to the kwin scripts which means that these scripts like bsmouth as an example could make use of this new api to extend on the functionality of this built-in new tiling that should by the way arrive in the next kd plasma version that is 5.27 so even if you are not a fan of this new implementation really it wasn't meant to be full tiling or anything you can still write an extension to extend its functionality which is just cool I mean wow this is the power of kd plasma after and that's everything so congrats to everybody involved the developer of bsmouth cronkid all of this nice extension and of course marco for the new functionality in tiling that is built in kwin and I do like tiling so I'm very happy to see that there is a significant progress in this area thanks for following along and see you tomorrow blah blah blah