[Feature Request] Allow for swapping layouts horizontally and vertically with a shortcut

[oulongwen]

Hello. I wonder whether it is possible to allow users to swap layouts horizontally and vertically with a shortcut like shown in the figure below. This would be a useful feature, especially for users with multiple screens. If there is already a straightforward way to achieve this, please let me know.

[agent-kilo]

I never considered similar use cases, so I think there's no straightforward way to do this at the moment.

This is a good idea though. Maybe some methods that rearrange child frames can be added to the frame object, so that we can implement this.

Thanks for the idea, I'll see what I can come up with 🤔.

Just being curious, in what circumstance do you usually want to swap the layout?

[oulongwen]

My workflow often needs to deal with multiple spreadsheets. I usually put them in two monitors so that I can have them side by side. Imagine I have the upper left layout shown above set up in my left (primary) monitor from my previous work, the spreadsheet I have been working on is in Frame 1. Now I would like to open another spreadsheet on my right (secondary) monitor and I would like to have the two spreadsheets side by side, therefore I would like to swap the layout to have Frame 1 on the right hand side on the left monitor. I may consider just expand Frame 1 to fill the entire monitor, but that means losing Frames 2 and 3 which I may use for other purposes (browsing, music, etc.). I hope this explanation makes sense to you.

A related request is to allow users to move the entire layout of one monitor to another, but that might be a little tricky since you have to deal with the situation where the target monitor is not empty (i.e., already contains open windows). An easy workaround is to allow for moving the frames to an empty monitor, but there may be better solutions.

[agent-kilo]

Thanks for the detailed explanation! I think your use case makes perfect sense.

I have put together a script that adds a new command, can you try it out?

That command may not be exactly what you want though. I wanted it to be more generic, i.e. I hope the user can be able to rearrange any level of sub-frames, with any number of siblings. So I implemented "rotation" instead of "swapping".

Using your original example, if you want to do the horizontal swap, you first activate frame 1, then call the new :rotate-sibling-frames command. And to do the vertical swap, you first activate frame 2 or 3, then call the same command.

There's a potential problem though. If you have a layout like this

+---+---+
| 1 | 2 |
+===+===+
| 3 | 4 |
+---+---+

With frame 1 and 2 belonging to the same parent frame, and 3 and 4 belonging to another parent frame, you can only do partial horizontal swaps with :rotate-sibling-frames 😅. Unfortunately there's no interactive way to select non-leaf frames in Jwno at the moment, so I'm not sure how to deal with this yet.

[olw0905]

Thank you for the quick solution! Your script works flawlessly 👏.

Regarding selecting non-leaf frames in Jwno, would it be difficult to modify the :enum-frame command to include non-leaf frames?

Anyway, the new :rotate-sibling-frames command suits my workflow well. I almost never have 4 splits in the monitor 😂.

[agent-kilo]

Glad it works for you 😁

Yeah, I guess :enum-frame can have extra :up and :down directions to walk the tree? The problem is, there's no visual feedback when a non-leaf frame is selected, so I'm afraid that would confuse users. I may need to think it over 🤔.

And I think the :rotate-sibling-frames command can be extended to handle monitors too. I'll keep playing with it.

[agent-kilo]

These new commands are now available in v0.9.12:

• :rotate-sibling-frames
• :reverse-sibling-frames
• :toggle-parent-direction

The first two commands also work for top-level frames, i.e. you can use them to move top-level frames across monitors. And they accept an optional depth argument, which can be used to select an ancestor frame in a certain level for manipulation.

For example:

[:reverse-sibling-frames 0]

This will work on all sibling frames of depth 0, reversing the order of all top-level frames (monitors). And this

[:reverse-sibling-frames 1]

will work on all sibling frames of depth 1, reversing the order of a top-level frame's children (all child frames inside a monitor).