You can think of expanding and contracting as the keyboard equivalent of window snapping. But it is actually a bit more than that.
There is a new feature in town. The expand and contract window shortcuts are there to quickly resize a window until it reaches another edge. It will snap to window edges, regions and monitor edges by default
Sometimes it is useful if a window would span multiple regions, because you are focusing on something for a bit. These keyboard shortcuts allow you to do that, in a faster way than changing your regions and then resizing your windows.
There are 8 keyboard shortcuts to learn:
| Expand | Contract |
|---|---|
|
Ctrl
NumPad4
Expand the window leftwards. |
Alt
NumPad4
Contract the window leftwards. |
|
Ctrl
NumPad8
Expand the window upwards. |
Alt
NumPad8
Contract the window upwards. |
|
Ctrl
NumPad6
Expand the window rightwards. |
Alt
NumPad6
Contract the window rightwards. |
|
Ctrl
NumPad2
Expand the window downwards. |
Alt
NumPad2
Contract the window downwards. |
There is a thing to note here. The keyboard shortcuts starting with Alt are not the opposites of Ctrl . If you keep using expand and contract leftwards, the window will continously move leftwards. You are essentialy picking a direction and an operation (expand or contract).
Contracting a window means that it will shrink on the opposite side. This means that the "opposite" of Expand left is Contract right.
Customizing the behavior
This feature is implemented as 8 separate recipes. This means that you can customize how it works — e.g. by changing it to snap just to region edges and monitor edges — once you've read the next chapter of the tutorial.