Multi monitor keyboard shortcuts in Ubuntu

I’m now using Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity as my primary OS for my desktop at work. I’m still coming to grips with Unity - somethings I like, others I don’t.

One of the things I do like is the compiz plugin called “Grid”. At first I thought it was just a clone of Windows 7 where you can drag a window to the left and it will fill the left half of the screen, drag it to the top and it will maximize, but after taking a look at the key bindings it does a bit more!

Using alt + ctrl + the number pad, you get more options! Alt + ctrl + 4 will make the window fill the left half (like dragging), 6 will do right, 8 will do the top half, 2 will do the bottom half and 7, 9, 1 and 3 will put the window in the appropriate corner, 5 will put it in the middle and 0 will maximize it. On top of this, if you press the key repeatedly it will adjust from 1/2 screen, to a 1/3, to 1/4, to 3/4 and to 2/3. This is surprisingly easy to use and really helpful!

The only thing I couldn’t work out how to do was move a window from one monitor to the other as these actions occur per monitor (i.e. 1/2 of one screen).

The answer was quite easy though, I just needed to enable one more plugin: “Put”. The “Put” plugin looks like it does similar actions to “Grid”, so before I enabled it, I disabled all the key bindings (there was only about 2 enabled anyway). Then I set the keyboard binding for “Put To Next Output” to <Control><Alt>KPEnter.

When I enabled it, the Unity panel got a little screwed up (which is evidently not hard to break), so I restarted X and everything worked how I expected it to. Now atl+ctrl+keypad-enter will move the window between my left monitor and my right monitor!