Seeing double

QI’ve been subscribing to Linux

Format for over 12 years now and it’s been a fascinating journey. Your recent innovation of sending email newsletters to subscribers helps me keep up to speed.

I’ve bought a new desktop PC and installed Linux Mint 19. I use

LibreOfficeWriter and need to display two documents side by side, so I can copy and paste text across from one document to the other. In Windows I right-click at the bottom of the screen and a box offers various options, including Show windows side by side. This enables me to display two documents at the same time.

How can I get the same result in Linux, using LibreOfficeWriter? I’ve looked at help forums online that claim there’s a bug in LibreOffice, then suggest workarounds which I can’t get to work. There must be a simple answer, as many people must need to have two documents visible on the desktop side by side and be able to transfer data from one to the other. AlfredDouglas,viaemail

AGlad you’re enjoying the newsletters, Alfred – the boss really enjoys writing them ( Ido?Oh, yes,sillyme,ofcourseIdo!–Ed).

I agree that having documents open side by side is terribly useful. There are a couple of long-standing bugs relating to nearly what you describe, although these concern tiling documents within a single window, which is a complex business. The side-by-side feature you describe isn’t a LibreOffice feature but a Windows one: you can use it for any application with multiple windows.

I don’t think there’s a way to achieve this with just one click in Cinnamon (Mint’s desktop environment), but there are some handy keyboard shortcuts, which also work in Gnome, that will achieve what you desire. Pressing Super (Windows) and the left/ right arrows will ‘snap’ the current window to the left/right half of the screen, so if you open one document and hit Super-Left Arrow, then open the other document and hit SuperRight Arrow then your mission should be accomplished.