gTile: you place a window
Open the grid over the focused window, select an area of cells with the mouse or the arrow keys, confirm, and the window moves there. The other windows stay where they are.
Both are tiling extensions for the Cinnamon desktop, and greenTile started as a fork of gTile. They answer different questions, though: gTile places the window you point at, greenTile arranges a whole workspace by itself. Here is how they compare.
Open the grid over the focused window, select an area of cells with the mouse or the arrow keys, confirm, and the window moves there. The other windows stay where they are.
Turn on auto mode or assign a preset to a monitor and workspace. Every window that opens, closes, minimizes or comes back is fitted into that layout, without opening anything.
Compared with gTile 2.2.1 from the Cinnamon Spices catalogue (the 5.4 code path, the version greenTile was forked from) and greenTile as described in its feature list.
| gTile | greenTile | |
|---|---|---|
| How a window gets its place | You select an area of grid cells for the focused window: with the mouse, with the arrow keys and Shift, or by typing two tile labels. | The layout of the monitor and workspace decides. A window you drag is dropped into the slot under the pointer, or splits a neighbour when dropped on its edge. |
| When a window opens or closes | Nothing moves. Two buttons in the grid, Auto tile main and list and Auto tile two lists, arrange all windows once when you click them. | With auto mode on, the monitor is retiled 300 ms later. New windows join the end of the layout. |
| Layouts | Four grids on buttons 1 to 4. Columns and rows are set in the settings, each with a relative span. | An automatic grid, sixteen editable starter presets and your own, painted on a 6 × 4 grid. A preset has rules by window count, so it adapts as windows come and go. |
| Per monitor and workspace | The same four grids everywhere. The grid opens on the monitor of the focused window by default. | Each monitor and workspace keeps its own preset and auto state, found again after replugging a monitor. |
| Changing sizes afterwards | Open the grid again and select a different area. | Drag a border and the neighbours follow, or use SuperAlt+arrow. Borders are remembered per window count. |
| Moving windows around | Alt+arrow in the grid moves the selection to another monitor. | SuperCtrl+arrow swaps with the neighbour; left and right walk on to the next monitor and workspace. |
| Gap between windows | No setting. | 0 to 48 px, screen edges stay flush. |
| Keeping windows out | No list of its own. When you tile a single window, only that window moves. | A never tile list by window class, title or app id, and SuperG to let one window float. |
| Install | From Cinnamon's Extensions manager (Spices catalogue). | Release zip with an installer script. Not in the Spices catalogue yet. |
| Cinnamon versions | Supports releases from 3.6 on, with separate code paths for 3.8 and 5.4. | 6.0.4 or newer; tested on 6.0.4 to 6.6. Wayland works in first tests. |
| Maintained by | The community, in the Linux Mint Spices repository. | Its author, on GitHub. |
Both can stay installed, but do not enable them together: they claim some of the same keys, SuperG among them.
greenTile is a fork of gTile 2.2.1, which was written by vibou for GNOME Shell and ported to Cinnamon by shuairan. The extension skeleton and the translation sources come from gTile; the classic grid was removed and the preset and auto model built in its place. Nearly unchanged code inherited from gTile is less than 1 % of greenTile's runtime code, measured on version 2.2.0 as described in the README. Both are free software under the GPL v3.
greenTile has limits of its own: no dynamic tiling tree as in i3, no tabbed containers, per-app rules for exclusions only. They are listed on the auto tiling page.