Mouse Interactions

Jay supports a range of mouse-driven interactions for managing windows, workspaces, and layout. This page is a comprehensive reference for all of them.

Tiling

Resizing tiles. Drag the separator between two tiles to resize them. The cursor changes to a resize indicator when hovering over a separator.

Moving tiles. Drag a tile’s title bar to move it within or between containers. While dragging:

• Drop it onto another position in a container to rearrange tiles.
• Drop it onto a workspace tab in the bar to move it to that workspace.
• Drop it onto the bar outside any workspace tab to create a new workspace for it.

Double-click a tile’s title to toggle it between tiled and floating. See Floating Windows for details.

Right-click any title in a container to toggle mono mode (showing one window at a time vs. all side by side). See Tiling – Mono Mode.

Scroll over a title in mono mode to cycle between the tiles in that container.

Floating Windows

Drag a floating window’s title to move it.

Drag a floating window’s border to resize it.

Double-click a floating window’s title to toggle it back to tiled.

Right-click a floating window’s title to pin or unpin it. Pinned floating windows stay visible across workspace switches.

Click the pin icon (if visible) to pin or unpin the window. The pin icon can be enabled with:

[float]
show-pin-icon = true

Workspaces

Scroll over the bar to switch between workspaces on that output.

Drag workspace titles in the bar to reorder them. This only works in manual display order mode (the default). See Workspaces – Display Order.

Window Management Mode

Window management mode enables additional mouse interactions that do not require targeting specific UI elements. Configure it by setting window-management-key to a keysym:

window-management-key = "Alt_L"

Hold the configured key to enter window management mode. While held:

• Left-drag anywhere on a floating window, tile, popup, or fullscreen window to move it.
• Right-drag anywhere on a floating window, tile, or popup to resize it.

This is especially useful for:

• Moving or resizing floating windows without needing to precisely target the title bar or border.
• Moving tiled windows without targeting the title bar.
• Moving fullscreen windows (not possible without this mode).
• Resizing tiles without targeting the separator.

Note

Entering window management mode disables all pointer constraints. This means you can use it to move the pointer out of applications that have grabbed it (such as games in fullscreen), but pointer-dependent applications will behave differently while the key is held.

Other

Toplevel selection. Some actions (like screen sharing) ask you to select a window, indicated by a purple overlay. During this selection, right-click a tile’s title to select the entire container instead of an individual tile.

Canceling interactions. Press Escape to cancel any in-progress mouse interaction (dragging, resizing, selection, etc.). The cancel key can be changed with the pointer-revert-key configuration:

# Use a different key to cancel mouse interactions
pointer-revert-key = "grave"

# Disable the cancel key entirely
pointer-revert-key = "NoSymbol"

The default is Escape.