Noob question: Keep tiles from scattering

[josh]

Welcome to the community and thanks for posting.

Spacer Tile Replacement

@Mark_Lewis

I sometimes leave a spacer in place for a tile that I will add later. Unfortunately, when I move a tile onto that spacer, adjacent tiles move and scatter even though I am just replacing that one spacer.

The best approach in that case is to remove the spacer tile which will leave the blank space in tact, then add the new tile to the dashboard as it will fill the empty space.

@Joel_Groves

I have pretty much given up trying to arrange tiles, it feels like shaking a marbles bag each time I move something.

When dragging a tile, it will always push other tiles down.

1:1 Swap of Same Size

If it’s a perfect 1:1 swap of the same size tiles, then it just pushes the other tile down… effectively swapping places.

Different Size: Gaps Filled

If the tile you are dragging is a different size than the tile it’s replacing, it will push the other tile(s) down to make space and if there’s gaps remaining, it will try to pull up other tiles to fill in the space. For example, if you drag a 1x1 tile over a 1x3 tile, it will push the 1x3 tile down then try to pull up two other 1x1 tiles to fill the space.

Different Size in Both Dimensions

If the tile is bigger in both horizontal and vertical dimensions, it may pull up additional tiles to fill in the gaps across multiple rows. For example, it you draggef a 2x2 tile over a block of multiple 1x1 tiles it’s able to just push those 1x1 tiles down as needed. But if a 2x2 tile gets dragged over another oddly shaped tile, it will push that tile down and then try to pull up other smaller tiles as needed to fill in the gaps.

Alternative Drag/Layout Ideas

@Joel_Groves

Here’s a ferw ways this could be fixed…

1. Drag to a new location simple swaps start and end positions - this is already way better.
2. Drag to new location swaps in the tile you dragged and exchanged the tile being dragged for the destinations old tile - place the exchanged one in a new location.
3. Introduce groups (without massive seperators!) and have the tiles only free-flow inside these groups!

I’m not sure any of these ‘fix’ the problem so much as move it. I think the reality is that there’s no perfect solution for this. While there may be cases where you want the tiles to swap places (eg. 1x1 over another 1x1), there’s plenty of other people who would not want that to happen and might instead prefer either the current push down approach or potentially even a push right approach.

I agree that some grouping concept could be a big help though as it seems like a lot of the use-cases where people are frustrated with the pushing approach means they aren’t happy if it pushes down or if it pushes right as they fundamentally want to keep a group of tiles together. There’s still other considerations for that including repositioning of groups themselves, group-of-groups type layouts that are common, and fixed size vs overflowing groups… but that’s probably better suited for a feature request thread. Speaking of which, I think Feature Request - Visual Grouping of Tiles/Tile Merging is the closest existing feature request for this.