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Windows and workspaces

The stacking window manager: drag, snap, workspaces and shortcuts.

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The window stack

TDE is a stacking window manager drawn in cells. Every window sits in one z-ordered stack — there is no automatic tiling layout — and clicking anywhere on a window, including its content, raises it to the top and focuses it.

Windows pinned always on top form a separate band: they are inserted above every normal window and stay there. Raising a normal window still moves focus to it, but a pinned window keeps painting over it.

Each window carries its own title, its own rendered grid, and three pieces of state you can toggle: minimized, maximized and always-on-top.

Action	Mouse	Keyboard
Focus and raise	Click anywhere on the window	`Alt+Tab` cycles
Move	Drag the title bar	—
Resize	Drag the bottom-right grip	—
Maximize / restore	Double-click the title bar	`Alt+↑`
Minimize	Title-bar button	`Alt+M`
Always on top	—	`Alt+P`
Close	Title-bar button	`Alt+W`

Maximizing remembers the floating rectangle it came from, so restoring puts the window back exactly where it was. Moving or resizing a maximized window drops that memory and un-maximizes it.

Moving and resizing

The whole window border is a move handle, not only the title row — any border cell that is not a button or the resize grip drags the window. That keeps a window grabbable even when its title bar has been pushed off the top edge.

The resize grip is an L shape in the bottom-right corner: the last two cells of the bottom edge and the last two of the right edge. There is no left, top or edge-only resize. Windows never shrink below 14 × 3 cells.

Tiling

TDE has two ways to snap a window to a region of the work area, both driven by a title-bar drag.

The drag-to-tile overlay. Start dragging a title bar; once you have moved at least two cells and the pointer enters the band at the top-center of the screen, a row of preview boxes appears. Hover one and release to snap the window into it. Leaving the band cancels the overlay.

The overlay always renders in one canonical order, whatever order you list the targets in:

text

Left · TopLeft · BottomLeft · Fullscreen · BottomRight · TopRight · Right

Halves sit on the outside, corners hug the middle, and Fullscreen is the centre target. Which of the seven appear, how tall the bar is, and how much hover padding surrounds it are all set in the [tiling] table — see Configuration.

Edge snapping on release. You can also skip the overlay and drop the window against an edge. That needs a real drag — at least four cells of movement — with the pointer within two cells of an edge or corner. A corner wins over the two half-edges that touch it, and the top edge maximizes.

Both paths produce the same rectangles, measured against the work area:

Target	Region
Fullscreen	The whole work area
Left / Right	Half width, full height
TopLeft / TopRight	Quarter, upper row
BottomLeft / BottomRight	Quarter, lower row

Odd widths and heights go to the right and bottom halves, so two snapped windows cover the area exactly with no seam column.

Workspaces

A fresh desktop has one workspace. Extra ones are created on demand — click the + at the end of the workspace pager on the taskbar — and the count only grows.

Every window belongs to exactly one workspace. Only the active workspace is composed, hit-tested and listed on the taskbar; windows elsewhere keep running but are not drawn.

Action	How
Switch to workspace n	`Alt+1` … `Alt+9`
Cycle workspaces	`Alt` + mouse wheel (only with more than one)
Switch or add	Click a number, or `+`, in the taskbar pager

Switching workspaces cancels any drag in progress and refocuses the topmost window that is left.

Overview

Alt+O zooms out. The overview draws the entire virtual canvas scaled into the work area: each window becomes a coloured block with its title, the focused one in the accent colour, and the part of the canvas you are currently looking at is outlined.

Click a block to focus that window, re-centre the viewport on it and leave the overview. Esc or Alt+O again leaves without changing anything.

Keyboard

Window-manager shortcuts are Alt plus a single configurable key. Every one of them lives in the [wm] table, so any of them can be rebound:

Default	Action	`[wm]` key
`Alt+W`	Close the focused window	`close`
`Alt+M`	Minimize / restore	`minimize`
`Alt+Tab`	Cycle focus	`cycle`
`Alt+↑`	Maximize / restore	`maximize`
`Alt+Enter`	New shell window	`new_window`
`Alt+O`	Overview	`overview`
`Alt+H` `Alt+J` `Alt+K` `Alt+L`	Pan the viewport	`pan_left` … `pan_right`
`Alt+P`	Always on top	`always_on_top`
`Alt+1` … `Alt+9`	Switch workspace	fixed, not configurable

Ctrl+Q quits TDE entirely, from anywhere.

The Esc leader

Kiosk sessions, some SSH clients and most mobile keyboards swallow Alt before it ever reaches TDE. For those, esc_leader is on by default: press Esc, then the shortcut key within 220 ms, and TDE treats it exactly as if Alt had been held.

If the window expires with no follow-up key, the literal Esc is forwarded to the focused app, so nothing is lost — it just arrives a fifth of a second late. The timeout is configurable between 80 and 1000 ms.

The work area

The bottom two rows of the terminal are reserved for the taskbar and the status bar; everything above them is the work area that maximize and tiling fill. The Notch reserves no rows of its own — it is an overlay drawn inside the work area.

Configuration — the [wm] and [tiling] tables in full.
Notch, taskbar and launcher — the chrome around the windows.
Control Center — the Tiling and Shortcuts panels edit all of this without a text editor.